


body in the garden

by silentwalrus



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: A tag that definitely applies but probably not in the way you think, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Amnesia, BDSM, Bucky Barnes The Amnesiac Village Bicycle, Bucky’s gaslighting himself pretty hard throughout this whole fic, F/M, M/M, Multi, Open Relationships, Polyamory, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Secret Military-Industrial Plot, because god forbid i make anything easy for myself, complete abandonment of realism, so much plot so little porn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-04
Updated: 2019-03-13
Packaged: 2019-03-27 06:05:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 21,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13874730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silentwalrus/pseuds/silentwalrus
Summary: James Barnes, former Army Sergeant and current amnesiac veteran, wasn’t aware he had a life to rediscover - or at least not much of one. Then some huge blond guy starts making cow eyes at him and calling him Bucky, and it only gets weirder from there.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Honestly? Really honestly? This was my excuse to write Bucky as a DOD yuppie in Uggs. Except in New York. I mean, they do say write what you know…

He goes out looking for - he doesn’t know what he’s looking for. Par for the course, these days. But it’s a Friday night and staring at his empty apartment seems lonely instead of comforting for once, so here he is. Out. Looking for something.

He finds it, sort of, in the basement back half of a remodeled warehouse in north Brooklyn. He has to go through the club upstairs to find it, and to be honest he finds it by accident-- when he ends up in the big throbbing main dance room, all he wants is a wall to put his back against.

He finds the other club instead.

The back door of the first club opens into another hallway, one of those awkward architectural whoopsies that happen when two or three or seven buildings get built over and around each other with only a passing nod to zoning codes or common sensibility. There’s a door and another set of bouncers down here, processing a couple of girls in tight leather. At first he thinks he’s stumbled into the ladies only half or something, but the bouncers don’t hassle him, just wave him over and pat him down. The bald one’s eyebrows lift when he checks James’ ID - yeah, James Buchanan, he’s heard all the jokes - and he checks a list on his phone, but then they nod him through, no cover charge.

He could’ve sworn he saw the girls pay, but the thought evaporates as soon as he steps in. If this isn’t what he was looking for, it at least pushes all the same buttons in his scrambled egg brain.

It’s a leather club, but relaxed about it. More of a lounge, really - there’s music playing, not as loud or as fast as what’s on upstairs, but not elevator music either. It’s got a slow, grinding bass beat, and the vocals are lazy and low. He liked what was playing in the other club too, but it was too sudden, the transition from quiet street to so many people, all of them _moving_. It’s less crowded down here, and most people are seated, at the bars or on couches and chairs. The lights are low, warm, and there’s a background hum of happy chatter audible under the music. It’s a social scene, the atmosphere all downmarket Hollywood speakeasy.

For a second he wonders why his first impression told him it’s a kink place, because at a glance it just seems like a nice lounge, nicer than is normal for a warehouse basement, even if the furniture is pretty eclectic. There’s a pool table, and in the corner a group of girls are playing Jenga; as he watches the blocks come tumbling down, the girls bursting into giggles and high fiving each other as it all comes apart. There’s a stage on one end of the room, and yes, that was it: it could be for anything except there’s a lattice back on it, and there’s no one up there now but his brain says _demo stage_ and provides a flash of knowledge that the exposed beam ceilings get used for - ropes?  

He must have been here before. The feeling solidifies the more he looks around, as he realizes another group of people are playing spin the bottle in a circle of couches and ottomans next to the stage. A lot of the outfits look pretty daring, too. One of the leather girls he saw come in has taken off her jacket and her top must be held on with some kind of glue, because there sure as hell isn’t anything else supporting it.

He goes cautiously to the bar, orders a ginger ale. His stomach’s temperamental at the best of times and alcohol doesn’t play well with his medication, but even if that weren’t an issue just the thought of getting tipsy is unwelcome. He takes his drink away from the bar and finds one of the unoccupied corner nooks to tuck himself into.

It’s - nice. He likes the music, the couch is soft and nicely upholstered, the ginger ale is sweet and bubbly in his mouth. He has decent sightlines, even, because it’s not so dark or crowded that he can’t pick out the exits at a glance. He can’t let go of the mild paranoia that dogs his steps these days, but that’s just background noise at this point. He’s actually - sort of relaxing, which is strange considering it’s a new place full of strangers and he got chased here by insomnia and kink shit tends to make most people just a _little_ uncomfortable.

Well, looks like tonight’s one of those nights where he discovers all sorts of new things about himself.

James sighs. He wishes those nights had the decency to come on a schedule, or at least warn him before delivering the metaphorical kick in the head. These days it’s just another thing he has to work through. This one seems benign, at least. So he went to a kink bar, enough that it made an impression. Cool. Fun. As personal revelations go, on this one he’s counting himself lucky.

Nobody comes up to him. James doesn’t advertise - the opposite, really - and most of the time it’s successful. He watches, picking at the sense of familiarity that slunk in so easily and never bothered to consult him first. A new game of Jenga gets started. The spin the bottle circle occasionally erupts in raucous giggles. A couple of people start playing pool, with an audience, and a few minutes later it becomes obvious it’s _strip_ pool, though what kind of rules they decided on James can’t imagine, given the two players are taking items of clothing off before each shot.

Everybody looks - normal. It’s a stupid thing to think but here he is thinking it. Half the people look like office workers and the other half aren’t wearing anything that would get them arrested on the street. It’s a calm room, lively but not on edge, and James doesn’t know if it’s because nobody’s actively getting flogged or if it’s _always_ like that and whatever the hell he calls his expectations just got misaligned. Maybe when he’d been here before it had been different. Maybe his brain is confusing reality with TV. Maybe it’s early in the evening yet, and once the clock strikes midnight all the clothes come off and people start charging at each other with whips and strapons.

James shakes his head at himself as he downs the rest of his drink. People are just people. This is just another thing that people do. Hell, he found this place  _familiar._ There’s a woman who could be his boss’s secretary on the couch nearby, a cat brooch pinned to her cardigan as she kisses awkwardly on the other woman across her lap. The bartender looks like any pincurled hipster in a floral blouse. There’s a big blond guy with his sleeves rolled up talking to her, in a fitted but boring dress shirt like he just came from work. The sloppily folded tie sticking out of his pocket stirs vague disapproval in James’ chest and that’s even more silly so he looks away, back to his ginger ale. Not much left there but the dregs.

He pushes himself up, figuring he’ll people-watch his way through another ginger ale before calling it a night. He’s halfway to the bar, passing the pool table, just as the big blonde guy turns from the bar and does a literal double take. _“Buck?”_

James stops, frowning. That hadn’t sounded like someone mispronouncing _fuck._ “Sorry?”

The guy steps away from the bar, though, and James realizes his face is ashen, his eyes too wide for surprise. “Bucky,” he says again, with something like agony.

“I… think you might have me confused with somebody,” James says carefully, planting his feet and getting ready to motor. The guy is huge - and more dangerously, he carries himself like he knows how to use it. Ex-military, he’d bet on it, and James doesn’t want to start anything it’ll take paperwork to finish.  

“Bucky,” the guy repeats, sounding dazed. “Bucky, it’s _me._ It’s me, you - how - ”

James shakes his head no, his hands drifting out to his sides. “I don’t know any Bucky.”

“James,” the guy says. James’ blood goes cold. “Bucky. James Barnes, James Buchanan - ”

James stares, probably ashen himself by now. He really wasn’t expecting this to happen tonight. Or ever, really.

Here’s the thing about amnesia: it’s a bitch and a half on your social life. Throw in an extended tour of duty, a mistaken KIA designation and no next of kin, and James Buchanan Barnes woke up in Walter Reed with no idea who he was and nobody to explain it to him. Nobody came to visit; if he had friends he doesn’t know how to contact them and they probably still think he’s dead. He’s lucky to have a goddamn roof over his head, let alone a job.

So it’s entirely possible James knew this guy. He just has no idea how. And right here, right now, feeling unmoored in a familiar-unfamiliar club with a jacked-up Army dom in his face, he’s not really up to doing any explaining.

“Sorry,” he says. “I gotta go.”

“Buck,” the guy says. He starts to reach out; it’s definitely agony on his face now. “Honey, please - ”

It’s the sweetness that does it, tips the frustrating into the terrifying as the yawning emptiness rips open with a vengeance behind his ribs. Whoever this guy is, however he knew him - James isn’t that guy anymore. He doesn’t have anything to give.

He shakes his head, fast, and backs away faster. The guy takes two steps towards him but James dodges behind a group of women walking to the bar and books it. He makes it to the exit and blows out past the bouncers at a fast walk, tugging the collar of his jacket up, stuffing his hands in his pockets and then speeding up into a jog once he turns a corner.

He makes it to the subway without anybody after him, though he switches trains twice at Times Square and 34th just to keep the paranoia happy. He’s not followed on his way back to his apartment, but he wanders in circles for a good hour anyway, his shoulders around his ears and his knees going numb from the cold. He approaches his building from the back, climbs the neighbors’ fence and then his own, landing in the three square feet of cement “backyard” attached to his building.

He doesn’t really sleep, but he does manage to doze through an hour or so of Sunday morning. When he pries himself up it’s to a puddle of sunlight, because a corner of one of the tarps he uses as shitty blackout curtains has come unstuck. James glares blearily at it but can’t muster the energy to stand up and fix the tape.  

Despite no cushioning interval of real sleep, in the sear of daylight the previous night seems like nothing more than a weird bad dream. James rubs his eyes and decides he’s done with insomniac wanderings. Next time he can’t sleep he’ll just have to read a goddamn book.

A handful of cereal and some tap water takes care of the food prerequisite on his morning meds. He sort of stalls out over the sink, after, but that’s a usual weekend symptom. Weekends, as far as James is concerned, are just yawning holes of space that barely redeem themselves by being time to do his laundry in. Maybe he should pick up a second job. He’s underpaid as is because of the brain damage but the hours are regular and more importantly it’s sitdown stupid desk work. He’s lucky to have it.

But he’s been getting better, slow as it is. The insomnia and fatigue aren’t crippling anymore, and he hasn’t lost his train of thought in weeks. Maybe it’s time to look into supplemental income. Extra dollars never hurt.

Since he’s decided to become a millionaire he resolves to treat himself to a hot sandwich. He’s got ten bucks a week allotted to sweets and usually he’d spend that on a fancy coffee or a big bag of gummies to last him until next Sunday, but this seems like the right time to spend it.

After all, he’s going to be rich any day now. Haha.

He goes to the deli a couple blocks down, which is not the closest one but it’s the one with the tastier cheese and larger candy selection. Manuel at the counter nods at him; James nods back and automatically heads for the candy aisle, which, alright, it’s not what he came for but it can’t hurt just to look.  

“Hey,” some guy says behind him, and when James turns around he nearly sprains something suppressing the reflex to jab the guy in the throat and sprint outta there like his hair's on fire. It gets condensed into a full-body twitch and a weird shoulder movement. It’s the Bucky guy from the club. James is gonna have to find a new deli.

Some of that definitely telegraphs through James’ face, or maybe the shoulder jerk was less weird than menacing, because Bucky Guy raises his hands and takes a step back. “I’m sorry,” he says quietly. “I just want to talk, I swear.”

James doesn’t relax. Bucky Guy might be trying to play harmless, but James can see his eyes and they’re _burning._ “What the fuck, man, what do you want?”

“Do you know who I am?”

James stares at him, like maybe it’ll help bring some common sense back into his life. “The guy who won’t let me order my damn sandwich?”

The guy gives a grimace that might be trying to be a smile. “I’m Steve,” he says. “Steve Rogers.”

“I don’t care if you’re the president or the pope, pal, what the hell do you _want.”_

Bizarrely, that makes the guy’s smile bigger. “I just want to talk,” he says, too gently.

“Look,” James says, beyond ready for this to be over, “If we were - buddies, or whatever, I’m sorry, but I don’t remember. I got blown up and I have amnesia.”

“Amnesia,” Rogers repeats, and, well, at least he doesn’t sound like he’s talking to a baby animal anymore. “You don’t....”

James is abruptly very, very tired. “I don’t remember anything,” he recites dully. “I only know my name because the Army had my fingerprints. I don’t have anything for you. I’m sorry.”

“You were - listed KIA - ”

“Bad intel. They were wrong. I’m sorry. I have to go.”

“Wait - wait,” Rogers says. He looks like he really, really wants to grab James, but all he does is hold out a card instead. “Here. Please, if you need anything, please call me. Anything at all. Any time. Please.”

James wavers, but Rogers’ crazy eyes say he won’t let James out of here without stuffing the card down James’ shirt if he has to. It’s just a card. He doesn’t have to call.

He takes it. “Sorry,” he mutters again, and this time Rogers steps aside, even as he looks like it’s breaking his spine to do so. “I gotta go.”

-O-

Three streets over and he’s up on the roofs, itching all over like he’s managed to contract a case of the ghost ants. He’d rather be at street level but sometimes it’s just not an option. It’s broad daylight so he sticks to the center of the buildings, eyes forward, trying to look like he’s moving with purpose, doing his best impression of a guy who’s _supposed_ to be walking across your neighbor’s rooftop. He has no idea how successful he is. He didn’t even get his damn sandwich.

It feels like ages before he can make himself come down, walk the streets, find a bench in a park. The guy found him, less than twenty-four hours later, after barely seeing his face in a dim bar in a different borough. If nothing else James had better figure out who his extremely efficient stalker _is._

He fumbles the card out of his pocket.

 _Steve Rogers_ , it says, in thick black letters. Below that: _SHIELD VC, Partner_ . And then, smaller: _Global Strategy & Security Specialist. _

James twitches a little. Great. Another security douchebag looking to hire him to pull triggers. Rogers probably knew him in the Army, and given that they’d run into each other at a kink club, they’d probably fucked, either stateside or on deployment. Wonderful.

There’s an address scrawled in ballpoint on the back of the card, along with two other phone numbers and an email, cramped in along the edges. Rogers probably would’ve put his goddamn Grindr username on there if he’d had room.

He doesn’t know if Rogers thinks he’s that good of a shot or that good of a fuck that it’s worth tracking him down at his deli for, but it doesn’t change the fact that he _did_ track him down. The business card is crisp, new, clean despite all the scribbling; Rogers hadn’t carried the thing around in his pocket while wandering around New York, just hoping to run into his Bucky person. It had been ready for James, for the moment, prepared in advance. Rogers hadn’t been surprised to see him there.

 _Steve Rogers. Security specialist._ James grimaces, but at least there’s no mystery there. Rogers almost certainly knows where he lives, and private security guys tend to have personal inroads to police departments, courts, all sorts of government records. Goddamm LexisNexis. Since James is living under his real name and making no effort whatsoever to hide, he doesn’t doubt that at this point Rogers knows more about his life than he does.

But he chose to engage James in a deli, on negotiably neutral ground, in a public setting with plenty of witnesses. He came alone. And while he looked at James like he wanted to _eat him_ , Rogers hadn’t wanted to hurt him.

And yet, somehow, James is _not exactly thrilled with these developments._  

On the other hand, it’s not like there’s much he can do about it.

He goes home. He doesn’t bother to try and lose any potential tails. What’s the point? His stalker knows where he lives and followed him into his deli and confronted him all for the grand and sinister purpose of handing over a business card with damn near every possible avenue of communication. Rogers is _begging_ for James to talk to him. That seems to be the grand total of what he wants.

James is really at a loss for a threat estimate here. The guy definitely struck James as the type of guy to do something drastic, but in this case, James suspects that something drastic was tracking James down in the first place. Probably. Hopefully. He doesn’t _know._

But the paranoia, usually so trigger happy in its coil around his brainstem, is barely giving a feeble little ping. James does not feel threatened. Maybe it’s whatever residual familiarity is lingering in his body, recognizing Rogers even as the rest of him draws a complete blank. Maybe it’s just finally failing on the one time it would actually be useful to have.

James pinches the bridge of his nose. He’s tired. He can’t do anything about any of this now. He’ll do his laundry early and go the fuck to bed. Dr. Xi is always threatening to write him another damn prescription and James wants to at least _try_ to handle his sleep-dep without resorting to drugs first.

He does his laundry. He eats his brussel sprouts and rice. He goes to sleep.

That night, he dreams.

Waking up in the middle of the night is par for the course, but this time leaves him blinking stupidly at the ceiling for a solid five minutes, because that had been - he’s had memory dreams before, except those are all inane, useless things, like his own hands lacing up combat boots or elbow-deep in the engine of a Army humvee. Those give him nothing he doesn’t already know. It’s either that, nightmares or nothing, these days.

This wasn’t anything like that.

He’d been sprawled out, on a couch somewhere, sundrenched and warm, and there was someone sucking his cock. James’ arms had been flung up beside his head, loose and easy, and he’d felt no desire to move them; he could barely keep his eyes open, blinking drunkenly at the sunny ceiling. Everything was one long summer Sunday morning. The orgasm had pulsed through him like an ocean wave dragging him under.

The mouth lazily, slowly pulled off him, and Steve fucking Rogers had loomed over him, wiping his chin and grinning. James had felt his own mouth stretch in return; he’d laughed when Rogers ducked down to kiss him, shrieked and giggled like a schoolgirl when Rogers had hoisted him up, throwing James over his shoulder with his pants still undone.

James curls in on himself, blushing and angry about it. So the guy had fucked him. So what. He knew that, suspected it, and - whatever they’d been, boyfriends or fuckbuddies or - whatever, they weren’t that now. James isn’t even that _person_ now. And he clearly hadn’t left this Rogers guy any forwarding contact info.

His dream self had been making noises, little _ah-ah-aah_ sounds with every tug on his cock. There had been no resistance tightening his muscles, no uncertainty. Rogers blew him like he _owned_ him.

James whaps his pillow over his face and tries to go the fuck to _sleep._

He holds out until his lunch break the next day, where he can’t help himself and locks himself in the bathroom stall and googles Rogers. Plenty of corporate stuff comes up - his LinkedIn, a YouTube link to a panel about the evolving global security landscape, a website for some kind of business consultancy firm called SHIELD. Couple of articles about fundraisers, charity organizations, investment decisions. There’s a headshot on the SHIELD website, a crisp, professional photo in desaturated blues and greys: Rogers is smiling, calm and confident and sincere. He looks about ten years younger than the guy who’d stopped James in the deli. James checks: the photo’s only two years old.

Rogers doesn’t have a facebook, or any other social media James can find. There’s the corporate Twitter account for SHIELD, but that’s full of links to business news articles and definitely run by some sad college intern. He clicks his phone off, disgusted. There’s no point chasing this. There’s no fucking _point._ You can’t rekindle a relationship with someone if you don’t remember there being anything to rekindle in the first place. It would be too fucking weird. Hi, I look exactly like your dead boyfriend, but call me James. It’s cool, it’s definitely not gonna be like fucking his zombie identical twin. Hey, you wanna tell me how to behave, too, given you remember my personality and I don’t? Let’s go for _maximum_ creepy.

No fucking thank you. He’d at least like to pretend he has self respect.

He gets up the next morning. He showers, he shaves, he goes to work. Life goes on.

But the dreams don’t stop. One night it’s Rogers in desert camo, looking like holy hell, tugging him by the hand into a maintenance corridor and grinding him hard against a wall under the red glow of emergency lights. Another night he’s getting banged over a bar’s bathroom sink with both arms held behind his back and it’s only the occasional flash of blond in the cloudy mirror that lets him know it’s Steve behind him. That, and the knowledge, the feeling, the certainty. The laughter. In his dreams he’s never uncertain, never confused. In his dreams James is someone else.

This is what he knows about one James Buchanan Barnes, a thirty-one year old guy with five months of personality: he doesn’t have much to say and he doesn’t seem to have much to feel, either. He does what he’s told at work and automatically goes in for overtime, especially on holidays. He likes animals, in a distant way: he takes a longer route home because it passes the dog park. He doesn’t have a driver’s license because having brain damage makes people really unwilling to let you drive, but he knows cars catch his eye, make him want to stop and pop the hood. He knows how to fix a broken microwave, a leaky radiator, a fried refrigerator coil, knows how to steal wifi from the neighbors.

He feels like maybe he could be curious, if he didn’t feel so goddamn exhausted all the time. Being constantly bewildered by everything except when suddenly and inexplicably he’s _not_ is draining as all hell. He files papers and copies reports and mails summonses and court records in a dull, comforting grey haze and takes the same route home every night, falling asleep in the day’s clothes more often than not.

But he showers every day. He brushes his teeth. His hair is too long but he’s clean-shaven, he doesn’t smell, he takes his six shirts and four pants and nine briefs and sixteen socks to the laundromat every Saturday and goes to the library every Sunday afternoon. He knows a lot of other vets have it a hell of a lot worse.

He goes to a private clinic for PT every Tuesday and Friday, checks in with the brain doctor at Mount Sinai every third Monday. Kaylie the PT nurse tells him he’s making progress and Dr. Xi the brain doctor tells him to be happy he can at least form new memories. He says it in a nice way, though, and he always offers James the little guava candies at the end of his appointments. James has a whole pile of them sitting next to his patched-up microwave at home.

Dr. Xi and the clinic are paid for by a private fund for disabled veterans. Rumlow told him about it, back when James had been struggling through the outpatient forms at Walter Reed, his handwriting barely legible through the tremor in his arm. It’s a good clinic; he’s lucky his application for eligibility went through. His arm barely shakes at all now, and Kaylie says if they keep things up all the degeneration from the coma will be completely gone by the end of the month.

He’ll never have the grip strength of a normal hand, and lifting anything heavier than a coffee cup is right out, but at least he can keep it steady. The tremor was what scared him, made him feel cold and trapped. Well. That, and the fact that he’s missing the internal recordings of basically his entire life.

Two months after he started work, he had enough scraped away to pay for a very small tattoo. He’s got _retrograde amnesia_ and three names on the inside of his forearm: his own, Dr. Xi’s, and the VA caseworker who handled all his whoops-not-dead-just-discharged paperwork. They’re all labeled, so he knows who’s who. Thin, neat black letters: nothing conspicuous. Just the name of his condition, and the people most likely to help him if he wakes up with no fucking clue who he is again.

He’s pretty careful about trying to minimize collateral damage if his brain suddenly decides to crap out on him again. He explained his story to the tattoo guy, who promptly gave him a steep discount; James gave him the rest of the allotted tattoo money as tip. He considered tattooing things like phone numbers, contact info, his own address, bank account, social security - but that’s all pretty stupid things to have on his arm, and won’t be the most help to him, either. People’s contact info changes. He just needs to know who to find.

That said, he does carry around two notecards that he laminated for a couple dollars at an Office Depot. One is for him: it’s labeled FOR YOU. It’s got all the details of his situation as he’d want it explained to himself. The second one is labeled FOR OTHERS, and also has his story except without all the swear words.

He locks himself in the bathroom stall at work at least once a day to take them out and read them over. As if memorizing the words will somehow be enough to brand them in his brain, anchor them in beyond even his own ability to forget.

It’s comforting, anyway.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Please see chapter end notes for content warnings.

The next night he dreams of the desert.

This one, he knows. Everything is black and grey and NVG green. In the desert it’s always night. He’s walking but he knows there’s a humvee behind him, off and to the side, people too. He knows who they are, or at least he knows that he knows it. They walk at night because it’s too dangerous in the daytime. But nothing is safe in the desert, night or no, and they hear it, he hears it, but by the time you hear it there’s nothing to outrun and nothing you can do.

And then there is light, and the ground is taken from beneath his feet, and the air itself flexes and snaps and punches outward. Shockwave. He’s just a splinter of grass in a hurricane. The airstrike keeps coming down, and down, and down, until it’s all there is, light, light, light, unending noise. Lights in his face. Fear.

Tubes in his throat, his arms, the beep of machines. There must have been a different hospital before Walter Reed because the whole world there was different. He can’t say how he knows but he does. He’s certain. It must have been why they strapped him down, there, because at Walter Reed he was confused and upset but at the first place he felt the sky was coming down. The whole time, the airstrike was still coming down.

He doesn’t wake gasping to this anymore. The detonation dream is familiar, the most he has of his past. He even usually falls back asleep after. Sometimes it feels like all he does at night is get blown up in his dreams.

Until recently. Until Rogers.

He rolls over, unawake, not asleep. Rogers smiles and the ground disappears from his feet. Cold flashes of light, halogens, hands holding him down. Cold metal chair. There’s something he has to be getting away from, but he doesn’t know what, and there’s something he has to tell Steve, but he doesn’t know that either. Steve is so happy to see him. Steve isn’t there at all. And he wakes up in the hospital with something missing, something missing, something is missing.

Somebody should be at his bedside. Somebody should be greeting him at the airport, picking up his backpack, leading him to the back of a bike. Steve hands him the helmet and then doesn’t let him do his own straps, fiddles with them for way too long, but it doesn’t matter, his hands are warm, his face is right there. And at home is the coffee Steve doesn’t drink, and the cologne Steve doesn’t wear, and when they get there Steve kisses his knee when he sits on the couch and helps him get his boots off -

And here he does gasp awake, pushed out of the space between dreams. It’s too much. For long minutes it’s too much for him to even process, too big, a feeling inside him that felt like it stretched from horizon to horizon.

He trembles, curled up alone on his mattress with the city’s lights spilling around the edges of his taped-up curtains. That was no casual hookup, no friends-who-fuck. James doesn’t even know if he can call it _boyfriends._ Fucking - The Notebook shit. What is he supposed to _do_ with this. He feels ambushed, cornered, caught off his guard, empty handed and found wanting, and - no, really, _what is he supposed to do?_

He does PT exercises until the sun comes up. Cornflakes, water, morning meds. He showers. He shaves. He goes to work.

And _then_ it all goes back to sex dreams, sex _thoughts,_ which he doesn’t want to say is _better_ but on the other hand it’s not the nightmares or the feelings so big it’s like his lungs are turning inside out. He finds himself scrolling through Rogers’ information online again, what little there is. He even watches the goddamn YouTube link, listening to Rogers talk for forty minutes about the necessity of lateral thinking when assessing the security needs of your client. That turns out to be a huge mistake, because Rogers’ voice is low and deep and measured, same as it was when he talked James through fingering himself in his goddamn dreams last night. _Damn_ the weirdly excellent audio quality.

He learns he’s much, much louder when it’s him at the other end of the blowjob, when the next night his dreams tell him _all about_ how Rogers had fucked his face, and that _Bucky_ would apparently have sex literally _anywhere_ because one blowjob becomes like, seven all blurring together and half of them are _outdoors._

In his dreams his hair is always short. It’s long enough to grab up top, over his forehead, but somehow James knows he doesn’t like it that way and that’s why Rogers won’t do it. He gets a grip on the back of James’ neck instead, the other hand at his jaw, one big thumb pressed to the corner of James’ stretched mouth as he drooled on Rogers’ cock.

Without warning the dream changes on him, and suddenly he’s still got a hand tight in his hair but now he’s eating pussy instead of sucking cock. At the other end is - a redhead, that much he knows, with a big scar over her hip that makes him vaguely regretful and small, hard, calloused hands. And he is _all_ the way into her, his jaw aching and his tongue going numb. “Steve teach you this too?” she says, her voice warm and teasing.

“No miss,” James feels himself say, looking up to grin wetly at her, “I had to learn this all by myself,” and the redhead laughs and drags him back down, not gently.

She’s not the only one he fucks around with. A dark-haired, red-mouthed woman with a grip like a croc bite takes him to a Berlin hotel room and makes him fuck himself just like Steve did, only she’s not so nice about it. A dark-skinned man with a searing white smile beats him at darts by grabbing his ass every time it’s his turn to throw and then fucks his mouth on what feels like a hallway floor. And all the while Steve is taking him to dinner, brushing his teeth next to him, touching him like something precious, smiling at him so readily, like he’s the only one in the world.

James can’t get away. The dreams start leaking into memories, cracked open in the daylight hours. He gets more of the redhead, fucking her somewhere cramped, dark, half standing up with her nails slicing up his back, and that melts seamlessly into another Army fuck except this time it’s - Sam, his name is Sam, in a god damn supply truck, Sam’s hand tight over his mouth as he makes James regret coming all the way out to the air transport hangar just to annoy him during his lunch break. Sam had gone back to work smug as a cream-filled cat and James had barely been able to walk back, and when Steve asks him _where’d you go_ he just winks and says _just equipment maintenance -_

James shakes his head hard, like that’ll get rid of it. He realizes he’s scowling furiously at the files in front of him. This is all bullshit. He’s stuck in the front-row seat of someone’s sexual fucking awakening, and the fact that it’s _his_ doesn’t make it feel any less secondhand. It’s all so - unmanageable. Embarrassing. He’s had more wet dreams than a goddamn fourteen year old in the past week alone and he’s probably going to pop a weird boner the next time somebody mentions comprehensive corporate threat assessment. Seriously, _fuck_ that YouTube video.

Over the next week the sex dreams die down, thank sweet merciful jesus, but it’s like they loosened whatever roadblock was set up in his brain and now all kinds of shit is pouring through. One night it’s a raid - somewhere in Afghanistan, covering his team, dropping three bodies with a long-range rifle and the strongest emotion being his annoyance with the cold making his hands stiff - and the next he gets a long, drawn-out, confusing argument with Rogers that starts off about lease length, detours into who does what chores and how, and ends with James scrubbing the inside of the refrigerator with OxyClean while threatening to move out unless Steve buys them a Roomba.  

At least they aren’t nightmares.

And then on the next one he wakes up gasping. He’d been naked again, and sitting in - Rogers’ lap. Rogers. Steve. He had James on his lap, belly to belly, his hands in James’ hair, his much shorter hair. James’ scalp is still tingling.

Ste - Rogers had been fully clothed, in a big soft t-shirt and big soft jeans. It felt good under James’ hands, his stomach, his bare thighs, the towel from his shower cast aside. It felt good in his head: sitting in his man’s lap, petted and admired, Steve’s blue eyes playful and sincere as he told Bucky about his ideas for the honeymoon - it had been the day after he’d proposed -

James falls off his mattress, shaking. He’s crying. There was a party. A dark room, the bar rented out, karaoke night in full force. _This asshole proposed to me!_ The words are alive, jubilant, coiled in his mouth like they’re waiting to leap off his tongue. _Can you believe it! The nerve!_ The microphone is cold in his sweaty palm and his other hand has a finger pointed right at Steve. He’s laughing. And - Sam is beside him, arm around Steve’s shoulder, laughing right along. Sam is Steve’s best friend.

James presses his face hard against his freezing floorboards. The timelines are all lining up in his head, falling into place. He didn't want to look too hard, didn't want to piece it together, because he knows it was all happening at the same time. Redhead, black guy. Red-mouthed girl, Steve. It all makes a horrible kind of sense. A good-looking soldier, a hotshot, the guy who had it all and wasn’t satisfied. Maybe it had seemed like such a small sin, in comparison, to a professional killer with everything coming his way. And yet here he is now, tears all over. He’d rather the nightmares.

No he wouldn’t. No, he wouldn’t.  

He scrambles up off the floor, wiping quickly at his face. He stuffs himself into his shoes and pants and coat and barely remembers to grab his keys before he’s out the door.

He just walks, his head down, block after block eaten up by the pace his own feet seem to be setting. What do you do when you find out you’re a bad person? You - well, you apologize. He has to apologize. If he blacked out drunk and crashed someone’s car he’s culpable even if he doesn’t remember it. Only now he does remember it.

He’s not watching where he’s going, the world blurred out, even the paranoid thing inside him gone soggy and sad. So when he notices he’s being followed it’s too late, and the guy’s partner is stepping out in front of him, cornering him between a set of mailboxes and a sheer building wall.

James slows, his hands coming out of his pockets, automatically turning so his back is to the building. The two men close in on him, slow but not too cautious, staying out of arm’s reach. James stops walking.

“Alright, be cool, man,” the first guy says, and opens his jacket to show he’s holding a pistol with zero fucking discipline. His finger is _on_ the trigger. “Get your wallet out, put it on the ground. Don’t try anything tonight and everybody walks away, nobody gets hurt.”

This has got to be some kind of joke. Tonight of _all_ nights, this is what happens: he gets stuck up by some weedy twelve year old in a North Face parka. “I thought this only happened in movies,” James says. It comes out exhausted.

“Well congrats, tonight you’re a motherfucking star,” the first guy says.

“Wallet out,” the second guy says. “Now.”

“I don’t have one,” James says.

“Yeah right. C’mon.”

“I really don’t,” he says. He doesn’t. He’s got three bucks in his back pocket and his metrocard and ID are zipped in the front of his jacket. He doesn’t take his debit card out of the apartment beyond a weekly trip to the ATM. Minimizing collateral.

“Bull _shit._ Get it out, buddy, don’t make me come and search you,” and the gun rises to face height.

It’s like a dislocated joint sliding home. James moves, and it takes less than two seconds for him to end up with the first guy wheezing and scrabbling in his chokehold, his pistol settled comfortably in James’ grip. It’s a Springfield XD-S, he notes absently, subcompact, built for concealed carry.

The other guy is frozen, mouth open. His hands are still inside his parka. “You carrying?” James asks, the pistol aimed center mass. The guy shakes his head, fast. “Good. Turn around. Walk. Faster. Don’t stop walking.”

The guy’s panicked footsteps fade, and James finishes applying enough pressure to knock the first guy out. He’ll come to in a minute. Bruised throat, nothing more.

James carefully lowers the guy to the ground, then speeds up and doesn’t slow down until he’s miles away, going from rooftop to street to rooftop again. He doesn’t stop until all the pieces of the gun have been wiped of prints and scattered across a five-mile chunk of Brooklyn.

His hands aren’t shaking. He’s not even breathing fast. His body knows this, remembers this, is intimately, easily familiar with this.

Here is what he inherited from James Buchanan Barnes, the guy who had this body before him: a fucked up arm, a landscape of scars, and the reflexes of a coked-up rattlesnake. He knows how to case a building, strip a variety of weapons, combine cleaning chemicals into explosives (and hadn’t _that_ been a fun one to remember, standing in the bodega aisle reaching for the Drano). He can pick locks, lift wallets, speak six languages - seven now, after he heard a couple arguing in Farsi on the train yesterday and understood every word. He can do more with a gun pointed at his head than most people can when they’re doing the pointing.

It’s one thing to be see _Sergeant James Barnes, 75th Ranger Regiment_ printed on paper and another to have his hands move in the smooth, perfect patterns of murder.

It’s never seemed all that relevant before. Between brain and body, he thought he was too damaged for that past to be anything but a set of discharge papers to him. To anyone else, either, no matter what not-so-subtle hints Rumlow likes dropping. When he looks at someone and sees all the ways to separate them from their keys, their composure, their wallet, he thought that was just the PTSD talking. It’s why he never says anything when Rumlow talks about _when you’re better, when you’re all healed up,_ because if this is what his service got him then why should doing it for private money be anything but more of the same.

Then again, that was before knew so much of himself. Maybe he should take it anyway. Maybe that’s all he’s suited for.

Here is what he knows about Bucky Barnes: the man was a killer, a liar and a stone cold piece of work. Rogers probably knew about the killer part, given he’s ex-military. James should tell him the rest. He should tell him - everything. Rogers deserves to know what his _fiancé_ was doing while he was smiling at him cow-eyed and picking out a ring.

It’s nearly four in the morning. If he heads out now he’ll show up criminally early, but he can wait in the nearest park. He has the address. Why bother going home. He’ll knock on Steve’s door, he’ll apologize, he’ll tell the truth, and maybe all of this will leave him alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CONTENT WARNINGS:  
> \- Bucky kinda gets mugged but nothing bad happens. Attempted mugged? He is an attempted muggee. 
> 
> \- There is no actual infidelity in this fic. Due to limited information in Bucky’s perspective, he is mistakenly under the impression that he’s cheating on Steve.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> GALWEDNESDAY STUFFED A BUNCH OF SENTENCES IN HERE THAT MADE ME CAPABLE OF FINISHING THIS AND FOR THAT I BLESS THEM FOR A THOUSAND GENERATIONS

James expected some kind of Chelsea penthouse, but it’s an apartment in Cobble Hill, which...yeah, okay, it’s still crazy fucking expensive, but at least it’s in Brooklyn. Walking there from Crown Heights takes him through the rest of the night and past dawn, the light going from grey to rosé pink as he walks, and the last several streets it’s like his feet have a mind of their own. He recognizes the building instantly, a big brownstone with heavy arch windows on the ground floor, the fenced front full of flowerbeds, barren in winter.

He takes the steps to the door and nearly cracks his head open when memory makes him stagger: this had been - his hands, unlocking the door, bare, in gloves, long sleeves, short sleeves, holding the mail - holding the groceries - holding flowers -

He’d lived here. Not just that: he’d been home here. This had been - his place. His.

He’d meant to _stay._

He rings the buzzer, wiping his eyes. He’s already here; might as well torture himself some more. It’s not his own tears he’s crying, anyway. Just Bucky’s leftovers again. Let him cry.

Five minutes later nobody has answered the door. James tries the buzzer again. No dice. His left arm has started to tingle and throb protestingly, the adrenaline washing out of him and leaving a body that has never been at a hundred percent in all the time James has known it. His hand is trembling again. There must have been an adrenaline rush, for all that he didn’t feel it; nothing else has this kind of aftermath.

He’d felt so calm, with the gun in his hand.

It takes long minutes, but eventually something about the awkward waiting in front of this locked door sparks inside him, and before he really knows what he’s doing his feet are taking him around the side of the building. He pads down the alley between his brownstone and the next, passing the trashcans and recycling bins until he’s under the fire escape around the back.

It’s easy to jump and pull himself up, even only using his right arm; there’s a half wall right beneath that makes it easy for him to scramble onto the lowest level. There’s another moment of disorienting knowledge, body memory: climbing up here in a backpack, with a duffel, with an honest to god potted plant under one arm. A golden pothos. Money plant. Fucking unkillable, the internet said, which is good because between all Steve’s trips and Bucky’s “trips” -

His foot slips and with it the strain of memory, and once James is done banging his knees against the rusty iron and scrabbling for the handrail it’s gone and he can’t pick it up again. He grits his teeth, folds his bad arm closer to his chest and continues upward. He takes the fire escape stairs up to the top floor, once again trying to look confident as he walks. It’s near six in the morning on a Sunday and people are likely to be home even if not actively looking out their windows, so he better look like he belongs.

Operating entirely on body memory, he shuffles onto the roof, and after a couple of seconds of confusion he sees the big mounted skylight.

He goes over there and crouches down. The surface is glazed, a one-way coating: no way to see inside. His hand knows right where to go, though, reaching around and under the side of the frame to find the little hidden bump of a switch. Push it forward, in and down, and the skylight pops open for him.

His brain reengages when he’s already got one leg over and his balance is shifting, slithering him down. He scrabbles with his good hand but it’s too late; his body might be mighty goddamn sure of itself but he has no idea what’s inside, if he’ll be landing on carpet or hardwood or just directly onto Rogers’ head.

It’s carpet. He lands with a soft thump, nearly falling on his ass by trying to compensate for his decommissioned arm. Gravity clicks the skylight shut above him and he stays crouched, trying to figure out just how dumb he’s just been.

It’s a bedroom, empty. It’s a pretty nice looking room - the walls are a light grey, the floors hardwood with the bright green rug he landed on covering most of the center. There’s a bed, a freestanding closet thing, a full length mirror and two doors; one is obviously another closet, and the other is pulled ajar, showing a couple inches of hallway.

That’s all the furniture in the room, but the bed compensates by being huge, an acre of cream sheets covered by an incredibly soft-looking green comforter. The frame and headboard are set up like shelves, and when James leans around he sees there’s lights tucked in there too. It looks custom. He finds himself running a hand along the wood, and - Sam. Sam made this. James yanks his hand back like the wood is burning, before he can know any more, before anything else surfaces. Before he gets any memories of fucking his fiancé’s best friend in his fiancé’s bed. He doesn’t know who Sam _is_ but he knows what he looks like naked.

And there’s the money plant, on the windowsill.

Sam made their bed. The fact sits unattached to anything else, but it’s weighty and certain inside him. James turns away from it, stiff and angry. He turns away from the plant, too. He should get out of this - bedroom.

There’s no sound coming from the rest of the apartment. James drifts towards the door, his footfalls silent by instinct, habit: he may have lived here once, but not anymore. Now he’s an intruder, and he finds himself thinking if he were armed Rogers would be well within his rights to blow his brains out all over this nice grey wallpaper. Has the means to do it, too: on the flicker of recognition James stops, turns and goes back to the bed. He crouches down beside it, covers his hand with his sleeve on automatic and slides it between the headboard and the wall.

His fingers close briefly on a pistol grip. It’s probably far from the only gun in the house.

Then he hesitates. From what he knows of Rogers, if he even turns out to be in the apartment he’s unlikely to try and shoot his fiancé’s ghost, but leaving an unfamiliar weapon unexamined in the same _building_ as yourself is straight idiocy, let alone the same room. James hasn’t left his fingerprints on it, but that’ll change if he decides to check the mag. His left hand will absolutely drop the gun on his foot if he tries to take it apart with the sweatshirt covering his fingers and he doesn’t have any gloves.

Common sense wins out. Safety first. And if he - if his past self, his body had lived here, then his prints are all over everything anyway. And why is he thinking in terms of fingerprints, anyway?

He extracts the gun from its holster, affixed to the back of the headboard. A Sig Sauer. Safety’s on. There’s no dust on it. It’s loaded, but no chambered round.

The serial number is filed off.

Well. That explains why he was thinking of fingerprints.

Steve Rogers. Security specialist. A lot of times that means digital stuff. Code. Sometimes it means strategy, figuring out who and what goes where and how.

Sometimes it means something else. Rogers, James saw, does not look like he sits at a desk all day.

James replaces the gun exactly as it was. That makes sense too. Rogers isn’t all he seems either, and a cocky bastard like Bucky, yeah, he’d go for that. A big motherfucker who went private and started doing the same work without the Army’s rules, and maybe not even the rules of a military contractor, either. And the kink, obviously. That fits too. Why bother to cheat on a criminal mercenary with his best friend if you don’t have whips and chains in the mix.

James levers himself upright, careful not to touch the bed. He should probably figure out how to get out of here. He has no illusions about whether he’ll be able to climb back up out of the skylight, so finding a fire escape window and closing it behind him is his best bet.

He slips into the hall. There’s a pull-up bar in the kitchen doorway, a set of weights on a mat in the corner of the sunny main room. A couch divides the kitchen from the living room and two giant potted trees flank it on either side, leafy monstrosities that have full moss beds in their pots and look like they might flower in the right season.

James gets knocked sideways again when he sees the couch: huge, fluffy-looking, a gentle grey that works really well with the lemony walls. He’s been fucked on that couch, eaten every possible meal on that couch, did his taxes, made doctor’s appointments, cuddled up reading, passed out drunk with Steve’s big warm weight under him -

The front door opens.

James realizes he heard the keys rattle in the lock without his brain flagging it as anything to worry over. He knows the sounds of Steve coming home. He glances around, heart pounding suddenly - fiancé or not, few people are overjoyed by surprise houseguests showing up before seven in the morning. But hiding would be worse, wouldn’t it? He _broke in._ What’s he going to do, duck in the pantry and leap out at Steve as he pours his morning bowl of cheerios?

He’s still frozen in indecision when Steve materializes around the corner, grabs his arm and spins him to slam against the wall - except James’ body is way ahead of him, twisting out of the hold and hooking a foot around his ankle. At that point Steve gasps _“Bucky?”_ and lets go of him, which topples both of them over. They hit the floor with twin thuds. Something goes clattering off - a cell phone - and James tries to twist but not in time and then whites out momentarily when his bad arm, stupid, stupid, reflexively tries to take his weight.

He falls straight off it, naturally, and directly onto his face. He must’ve made some kind of noise, because the next thing he hears is _“Bucky,”_ in a very different tone, and Steve’s rolling him over.

All James’ thoughts of potential mob associations dissolve in the face of Steve’s giant pink presence radiating concern from every pore. He’s in track pants and a sweatshirt and damp all over with sweat, heat rising palpably from his skin. “Are you okay? Did I hurt you?”

James can only stare up at him, gasping through his teeth, heart hammering in his ears. Steve reaches out, pressing two fingers to James’ neck under his jaw, over his pulse. “Buck?”

It breaks the spell. “I’m fine,” James manages, which is true even if his shoulder has woken up and started screaming. He pushes himself to sit up, trying not to cradle his arm too noticeably; it dislodges Steve’s hand and he takes it away, but only to leave it hovering in the air like he’s trying to use the Force to help James sit. “Bucky,” he says. “You - I - What are you doing here?” And then, before James can even open his mouth, “Were you crying?”

The damn baby animal voice is back again. James grits his teeth and fixes his eyes straight ahead and keeps them there, getting himself to his feet. Steve rises with him, at the same speed, even, which has got to strain even his enormous goddamn thighs. “What happened to your arm?” he says.

James almost laughs. An AGM-114 Hellfire, pal. “I’m fine,” he says instead. He didn’t come here to have Steve babytalk at him while he blunders around like a drunken buffalo. He came here to tell Steve his closest people were cheating on him with each other.

Hell of a subject to break. How do you lead in to that? Hello darling, remember those good times you say we had? All your cherished memories? Well hold onto your socks because I’m about to shit all over them. You’re welcome!

Steve deserves to know. It’s a question of ethics. James should just say it. Rip the bandaid off.

“I was your - fiancé,” James says abruptly.

Steve’s face goes buttery and soft in surprise. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, you - we were gonna get married. You - remembered that?”

“I was cheating on you,” James says, unable to keep looking at that face.

There’s a silence. Then Steve says, “Uh… Are you… sure?”

That is _not_ the response James was expecting. He swivels back to Steve. “What do you _mean_ am I sure?”

Steve looks sort of indulgently dubious, and James discovers that the ignominy of being sent headfirst down a sexual Slip ’n Slide of personal revelation is nothing compared getting fucking looked at by that face. “Yes,” he says sharply. “I’m sure. I was fucking around with your friends. With a girl _and_ a guy - ”

Steve blinks, his eyebrows rising. “Short redhead, tall black guy?”

Does Steve just not _believe_ him? “There was a British chick with lipstick, too,” James says meanly.

Steve looks like he’s trying very hard not to smile. “Peggy,” he says. “Or, well, whatever version of Margaret you were calling her that week. The redhead is Natasha, the guy is Sam - ”

“I know their _names,”_ James snaps, even though he mostly hadn’t. “I was getting fucked by each and every one of them every time you - ”

“Honey, I _know,”_ Steve says, horribly gentle. “It’s alright. I know. We all knew. I’m not sure which memories you’ve got back, but, uh.” Here he stops and actually coughs a little. “Once you get a little more back you will, uh. Definitely see that.”

James stares at him. It’s a long, long minute of the universe rearranging itself like bad tetris. “Are you telling me. That we had orgies.”

“I wouldn’t call them _orgies,”_ Steve says, even as his ears go bright red.

“Oh yeah? How many people does it take before it’s an orgy? I think _five_ sure as hell qualifies, pal!”

“It wasn’t _all at the same time,”_ Steve protests, actually sounding scandalized. “Nobody had a big enough bed, and god knows getting _our_ schedules to line up was hard enough - ”

“So no orgies, sure, but not for lack of trying? No orgies, but only because of _scheduling conflicts?_ ”

“Well when you put it like that,” Steve says, his ears practically glowing. “But - you weren’t cheating, Buck. Trust me. Everybody knew.”

“How do I not _remember that,”_ James snaps. That seems like a _critical fucking detail,_ and yet - it doesn’t seem _real,_ but why on earth would Steve lie about _this?_

“Right,” Steve says softly. “Amnesia.” He’s back to looking at James like he’s an injured rabbit. “Can you… will you tell me what happened?”

James gives him an incredulous look. “You want to hear all about how we fucked? I thought you were _there.”_

“I mean how you came back,” Steve says, much more quietly. “I… we held your funeral last June.”

James closes his mouth. In all his intracranial wandering it hadn’t hit home that Steve _lives_ here, that _he_ had lived here. They lived here, together. Steve’s fiancé had _died._

Jesus. Jesus, that would hurt. Cheating or no cheating, if James had a dead fiancé he’d probably sell everything he owned and then tattoo over his own face for good measure, just so he wouldn’t recognize it in the mirror. He wouldn’t be able to even _look_ at blonds ever again, or, or men, or people named Steve -

It’s too big, too raw, the feeling poured into him like a gallon jug dumped into a thimble. James squeezes hard at his bad arm, pressing it tighter to his chest. Cheating or no cheating - or _whatever_ the hell kind of brouhaha they’d had going on - Steve’s fiancé _had_ _died._

And then something that looked exactly like him came back, and he didn’t know how. James should tell him. Steve’s owed that much. He deserves to know this, too.

“Is your arm okay?” Steve says.

 _“Fuck_ my arm,” James hisses, jerking to face him. “It was an airstrike, okay? A fucking airstrike. Some dipshit pressed the wrong button, they got the coordinates wrong, and we got blown to kingdom come. Everybody else died and all I got was this _fucking_ arm and a shitton of muscle atrophy from a four-month-long coma. Oh, and the amnesia! Thank you, multiple skull fractures! Can’t forget _that_ little nugget!”

“Buck,” Steve says. He’s gone white under the ruddiness of exertion.

“That’s what happened,” James says, the meanness dropping out of him all at once, like a trapdoor opening up beneath his feet. He just feels hollow and thin, an eggshell with its guts drained out.

Some days it feels like the desert is all he is. The flattened sand, the sky falling down. The occasional burst of ire - of meanness, vindictiveness, because he _was_ mean, he’d bitten at Steve for no better reason than him being there to bite - only highlight how dead it is the rest of the time. He can’t even deliver his own bereavement condolences right.

“Can I hug you,” Steve says.

“What?”

“Can I hug you,” Steve repeats, with no change in tone. He hasn’t moved, but manages to give the impression of vibrating at high speed anyway. James doesn’t see any good reason to say no, especially since the alternative is probably watching Steve have some kind of extremely uncomfortable moment of inner sublimation, and jerks his chin in a go-ahead gesture.

Steve holds him tight, tighter, one hand gripping the back of his neck, and right at the point where James starts to want to struggle Steve squeezes him even harder and it all tips over into - calm. The hug is - custom, is the only way he can describe it, and despite the fact that Steve can’t know how exactly to handle his bum arm he’s not hurting it at all. James doesn’t want to get away.

Feels pretty secure, actually. James grunts a little and shifts in the grip. He finds himself wanting to push back into it, feel the pressure increase.

“I don’t want to make it - hard for you,” Steve says. “It’s just. You died. And now you’re back.”

James swallows. Steve rubs one hand all the way down his spine and then back up, slow. It’s calming, it’s _working,_ a lot fucking faster than any of the breathing or counting or naming shit does.

Steve knows what he needs, what his body needs, knows better than he does. It’s jarring and weird and somehow comforting, and James is not going to be the bastard that makes it any worse for a grieving man. He can tell Steve what happened. It’s not like it’s any secret.

“It was a recon mission,” he tells Steve’s t-shirt, his voice hoarser than he’d like. He feels Steve’s muscles shift under his chin. “The airstrike came down in the wrong place. Killed my team. I got lucky, damage was - I can use my arm, still. Almost full functionality.” He inhales, exhales, as slow and steady as he can make it. “I was POW for a while.”

Steve doesn’t move. Inhale, exhale. “Nearly four months, they said. CIA op found me mostly by accident. I wasn’t really - awake, they said.” He rocks his forehead against Steve’s trapezius a little, side to side. “I don’t remember anything. Just. Little bits. Noise, sometimes. And. Dreams.”

“Honey,” Steve breathes.

James inhales again, his grip tightening in Steve’s shirt. “It’s starting to come back,” he says, voice cracking.

“Jesus,” Steve whispers. “Fuck. Ah, Buck. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

James breathes wetly into Steve’s shoulder, trying to scrape himself together. “I was in the hospital a long time,” he mumbles. Now that it’s coming out it doesn’t want to stop. “Coma. Then I. Got sent home. Here. Ex-Army guy got me a job, filing paperwork at an office downtown. Five months now.” He swallows. “I’m sorry.”

“No, honey,” Steve says immediately, sounding cored. “I’m so glad you’re here.” His voice is cracking. “I’m so, so glad you’re here.”

James is startled into a laugh that comes out more like a snorfle. “I broke in,” he says, muffled into Steve’s shoulder.

“I’m used to it,” Steve says, sounding watery himself. “You used to do it all the time. There was a whole month where you dropped your keys on the subway tracks and couldn’t be fucked to get another set copied, so you came in through the skylight. Every damn day for five weeks.”

“I bet the neighbors loved that,” James mumbles.

“Not as much as they loved you installing the skylight in the first place.”

James lets out a _hah_ under his breath. Steve pets him, firm and thorough, dragging his heavy hand down James’s back, and then his shoulders start shaking too, a seismic event against James’ face.

It takes him a second to realize Steve’s laughing. “What?”

“Nothing. I mean. It’s just - I go to your bar for the first time since - and you’re just _there_ -”

James draws back slightly. “ _My_ bar?”

Steve draws back too, enough to look at him. “Yeah,” he says. “Your birthday bar.”

“It was my birthday?” James says, now thoroughly lost. He could’ve sworn his files said his birthday was in March, though coming up here he also would’ve sworn he was slutting his way through Brooklyn with nary a care in the world, and look how right _that_ turned out.

“No,” Steve says, now looking worried. “It’s… You don’t remember.”

“No,” James says, pointedness creeping into his tone. “I don’t.”

“How are you now?” Steve asks, not even noticing. “Your arm, your - head.”

“I can make new memories,” James says, answering what Steve’s really asking, feeling another vague stir like the ghost of annoyance but too tired to really feel it. “And that’s lucky. Total crapshoot on what’ll come back and what won’t.”

“And the arm?” Steve asks softly, searching his face.

James shrugs minutely, looking down. “Got medicine,” he says. “Shoulder’s fulla pins. I do exercises for it. Got doctors.”

“Bills?”

“I qualified for a special disability fund. Private clinic.”

“Oh. That’s good.”

“Yeah.” James tries to sniff without sniffling. “Got lucky.”

“Yeah,” Steve murmurs, squeezing him in hard again just as James is starting to feel self-conscious. It brings his head to Steve’s shoulder and after a second he gives in and lays it there. He’s suddenly hit with a wave of exhaustion, the kind that isn’t a trick of insomnia - the kind of tired that promises if only you lie down you’ll sleep.

“You want anything?” Steve murmurs. “A drink? You must be thirsty.”

James sniffs again, considering it. It’s weird to want alcohol when you already feel drunk. But he _is_ thirsty. And needs a tissue. “Juice?”

“Juice.” Steve kisses the top of his head and neatly changes his grip into a guiding arm around James’ waist, taking them to the couch.

“And a napkin,” James says, feeling like he should object to this surprisingly smooth manhandling but mostly bowing to the complaints of his knees. “Some kleenex or something.”

“Copy,” Steve says, taking the grey fleece blanket blending into the corner of the couch and draping it on James’ front as he sits. “Be right back.”

James takes the blanket, feeling vaguely cranky at being so handled but also somehow soothed. He rubs his damp cheek against the couch, and abruptly gets hit with another memory: he’s bent over the arm, legs spread wide, gasping wetly into the cushions as Steve smacks him _hard,_ and he’s come already, his ass wet and used, and Steve’s gonna fuck him again when he’s done -

James chokes a little, his eyes going wide. Steve must hear it, because the sounds in the kitchen pause. “Buck? You okay?”

“Jesus omelet-frying Christ, what _haven’t_ we done on this couch,” James says, pulling the blanket tighter around himself like a priest gathering his cassock. “This thing better get deep cleaned _regularly.”_

Steve laughs, somewhere close by. “Yeah, you used to go over that thing with the steam cleaner every week,” he says fondly, eyes bright, rounding the side of the couch. “The rug around it, too.”

“So you’re saying it’s become an active biohazard in my absence,” James says, struggling upright and accepting his glass of juice. Cranberry? Cranberry.

“Yeah, well.” Steve sits on the edge of the couch and watches him chug it down, smiling lopsidedly. “It hasn’t seen any action in a while.”

James stops drinking to glare at him. Because you _died,_ is the unspoken chaser to Steve’s sentence, and he’s _smiling._ “If you make me start crying again I’m dumping the rest of this on your head.”

Steve laughs, a little wetly, putting his face in his hand. “What happens if _I_ start crying?”

James points at him with one finger, still holding the glass. “Watch out. I might hug you again.”

Steve leans back and settles in next to him, turning his cheek to the couch so he can keep watching James. “That’s not really an incentive to stop,” he says, red-eyed and smiling. He’s staring from point-blank, the carnivorous intensity of his gaze not softened in the slightest - only glazed a little, maybe, by the ferocious joy coming off him like steam.

Anyone else and James would be wildly uncomfortable, but he’s rock solid certain that Steve is thrilled to bits just to have James sitting here, breathing his oxygen and snotting up every piece of fabric he can get his hands on. James hasn’t made him any promises, hasn’t done anything but make him cry, too, but Steve so clearly doesn’t care.

And right now, at least, the thought doesn’t hurt. He doesn’t feel like an impostor or a ghost, like his face and body are lying to people about what they’ll find inside.

He feels weirdly light, actually. Maybe all the _talk about your trauma_ stuff isn’t all garbage all the time. Or maybe he’s just too cried out to have real feelings right now.

Or maybe it’s the juice. He looks suspiciously at the glass, and as he turns it in the light he’s ambushed by a memory of picking it out of a catalog, comparing heights and weights and shine like a person who had room in his life to spend time _optimizing his juice glasses_.

“These are mine,” he says, almost forgetting Steve’s still next to him.

“Everything in the kitchen’s yours,” Steve says. “You just let me use it.”

Which means that really everything in the kitchen is Steve’s, household goods that he inherited when Bucky died. But there must have been other things that were Bucky’s alone. James finds he’s morbidly curious about what mementos Bucky left behind.

Maybe it’s just guns.

“What about the rest of it? Clothes, books,” James says.

Steve’s eyebrows come together, and for a second James is certain he’s about to confirm that Bucky Barnes really fucking is just a goddamn murder automaton whose most precious worldly possessions are a supersized box of condoms and two hundred back issues of Guns & Ammo, and that the fastidiously stocked kitchen is just a front for his body disposal operation. “Oh. Well, I, uh, have some of your stuff,” Steve says. “Almost all of it, really.”

Well, that makes sense, given the whole fiancé thing. “Is it in Brooklyn?” He has no idea where storage is cheapest anymore. “Can we go get it this weekend, maybe? Or the next? I don’t have - what’s that face. What.”

Steve gives another weak smile. “It’s all here, actually. In the apartment.”

“In the apartment,” James says flatly. The mental image of Steve packing up his dead fiance’s belongings he’s been trying to ignore morphs into a much worse image of Steve spending the last fourteen months faithfully dusting his dead fiance’s belongings, preserved in situ as some kind of horrifying shrine.

Steve takes one look at his face and stands, gesturing towards the bedroom. “You want to see?”

As a diversion, it’s pretty transparent, but James _does_ want to see, if only to probe out the fully horror like exploring the cavity of a tooth. When he follows Steve, he takes the blanket with him. He needs the fortification.

“There’s your clothes,” Steve says half over his shoulder, leading the way into the bedroom sideways like the possibility of walking into a wall is well worth not looking away from James. “And your winter coats and things…”

James starts to head for the freestanding rack, but Steve redirects him. “Ah, no. That’s my closet. That,” Steve says, pointing towards the other door, “is your closet.”

James goes to the closet - the _walk-in closet -_ and feels the blanket drop out of his grip and slither down to his ankles. He is - apparently - the kind of guy who hangs up his clothes _by color._ He’s apparently the kind of guy who _hangs up his jeans._ He reaches out and flips through them: Diesel, Diesel, 7 For All Mankind, Diesel, _Gucci_ \- what the hell, Gucci makes _jeans?_ \- and a dozen more brands he doesn’t even recognize. “What the fuck,” he draws out under his breath. “Steve, what the _fuck_ is this.”

“What the fuck is what?” Steve comes closer, stepping into the closet, which puts them pretty damn close to each other. It might be a walk in closet but it’s still an apartment in Brooklyn.

Steve looks at the jeans James is holding up like a dead chinchilla. “What’s wrong with your pants?”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” James says. He snatches at the nearest suit, looks at the label and nearly faints. “This is _Dunhill!_ Was I hustling coke on the side? Did I have a _trust fund?”_

“You had hazard pay,” Steve says, looking bewildered. “And your Christmas, birthday and anniversary gifts for the past six years have all been shopping trips - ”

“Oh no,” James says in dawning horror. “Are you - don’t tell me you’re my sugar daddy.”

“What? No!”

“So I just took your credit card for a joyride any time I felt frisky, is that it?”

“No! You literally told me, ‘Steve, the only way for you to be worse at giving gifts is if you actually _took them away’_ , and if I really had to get you something then I could come along, sit on the boyfriend couch while you tried things on and then hold your bags while you forged my credit card signature!”

“Steve, that is the literal _definition_ of sugar daddy!”

“No it’s - you give me stuff too!”

“Oh yeah? What did I give _you?”_

Steve visibly struggles for a second before looking triumphant. “My cufflinks.”

“That’s all?”

“Oh! And my watches.”

“ _That’s all?”_

“They’re nice watches!” Steve waves a hand. “It’s not - You cook, you clean, you furnished the apartment, you make sure I look human leaving the house, you’re the reason I have _manners - ”_

“I _cook?”_ James is momentarily derailed, then snaps back to the matter at hand. “You literally - You just described a housewife. Oh god, I’m your _trophy wife.”_

Steve’s chiseled fucking face still manages to look ruggedly attractive even while doing a great goldfish impression. “We _served_ together! We have a joint bank account!”

“Oh _great_ , I scammed you into that, too?”

“You didn’t scam me into anything! You set me up an _investment portfolio_ and bullied me into buying six businesses!”

James snaps his mouth shut on his next barb and blinks. “Oh,” he says. “Yeah, okay, that’s - better. That’s worth a couple suits and some blowjobs.”

“Bucky,” Steve says. “Bucky, you made us _rich. You_ did. And even if - Buck, you’ve carried me through so much. It’s not about - you could never owe me anything. I love you. What’s mine is yours.”

“Show me the paperwork,” James says.

-o-

Steve shows him the paperwork. Their joint bank account, their tax records, their copy of the lease. He has an expired copy of James’ - Bucky’s - passport and two of his old driver’s licenses. The photos of him are all universally terrible.

He also has a copy of one James Buchanan Barnes’ will.

“It’s null, since you’re not dead,” Steve says, sliding it over. “And it’s a pretty standard one, same as mine.” And he slides _that_ over too.

James reads through both. He compares the two. In the event of Steve’s death, James Buchanan Barnes is the executor of the estate, and vice versa. For Steve, one Samuel Thomas Wilson gets the vehicle, one Natasha Alexeyevna Romanova gets his paints, brushes, canvases and art, and a Margaret Carter gets two handguns and some complicated paperwork that makes her the sole owner of Steve’s business.

For Bucky, Sam gets a set of copper pans and Carter gets a knife collection, which he apparently has. Natasha gets the money plant. In both cases, the money goes four ways.

“So we really were all…” He can’t bring himself to say _fucking,_ not when it was so clearly something more. “Involved.”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “I - when I - after we talked, at the deli, I told them. That you’re alive. I didn’t know you’d be here today, or I’d have called them.”

But James isn’t really listening anymore. “You were my next of kin,” he says slowly. The paperwork for that isn’t here, but he feels certain and in any case Steve’s nodding, brow wrinkled. “But. Nobody told you I was alive.”

Steve’s face resettles into hard lines. “We’re looking into that,” he says. “I was listed as your next of kin and medical proxy. I have the clearance. I should have been the first to know.”

“Paperwork SNAFU,” James echoes, but the words feel dry in his mouth. Steve isn’t some random flyover-state housewife with nothing but a high school degree and the local pastor to back her up, poking into what killed her army husband. Steve has weight to throw around. He should’ve gotten answers.

Besides. An American soldier come back from the dead. Wouldn’t that have made the news?

“We’ll figure it out,” Steve says. “You’re here now.”

He certainly fucking is. “I need to use the bathroom.” He needs a minute. He needs a fucking _week._ His head is starting to ache, a sharp throb behind his eyes.

Steve shows him to the bathroom, even though the apartments not that big and in any case James knows where it is. He closes the door behind him, not trying to be a dick about it but completely incapable of leaving it open, and he hears Steve pause and then walk away, probably to top up James’ juice.

He splashes his face in the sink, feeling like the blackened charcoal cancer bits Manuel and the deli guys scrape off their panini press at the end of each day. The mirror’s pretty damn big but he’s not interested in whatever the fuck he looks like right now. His eyes focus on the sink counter: it’s a neat little tableau, sections clearly delineated - there’s a small cluster of shaving cream, razor, deodorant, toothpaste closest to the sink, and then a little further is three straight rows of products, lined up with geometric precision, organized by size. Beyond that is one of those wicker basket things with more miscellaneous items, but it’s clear to see that this was once a bathroom for two people.

And now it’s just one. A pretty sad-ass one. The shaving cream is the cheap store-brand shit, the plastic razor a ghastly neon orange. There’s a comb next to the toothpaste, but it looks like one of the mass-produced ten cent ones handed out on airlines in those shitty first class amenities packets. The toothbrush positioned with its head hanging over the sink needs to be replaced, its bristles bent out every which way.

He hears Steve approach outside just as he catches sight of another toothbrush, clearly used, stuck alone in a holder by the product phalanx, and realizes with abrupt horror that it’s got _dust on it._  

James snatches it up and confronts Steve with it at the doorway. “Is this _my toothbrush?”_

Steve’s eyes are trying to cross, but he’s clearly picking up that _something_ isn’t right here. “Uh… no,” he says. “Of course not. Definitely… not.”

That just about puts the cherry on it. James backs him out of the bathroom. “So here we are,” he says.

“Here we are,” Steve agrees cautiously, still retreating.

“Standing in an apartment full of your dead fiancé’s stuff,” James says dangerously.

Steve flinches, very minutely. “It’s _your_ stuff.”

“Steven, listen very carefully to this sentence: ‘This is my fiancé’s toothbrush, which I still have sitting in my bathroom despite the fact that he _died a year ago_ .’ You wanna tell me what’s wrong with that? Here’s a hint: _everything!”_

_“You’re not dead!”_

“You didn’t _know that!”_ James gestures wildly around the room with his good arm. “My goddamn toothbrush! Please fucking tell me you don’t have a pair of my dirty boxers framed up on a wall somewhere!”

Steve’s face screws up slightly, the edges of anger starting to creep into the set of his shoulders. “So throw it away,” he says, tightly. “I didn’t keep your _toothbrush_ on purpose, I just didn’t get to - cleaning things out, and it’s a good thing I didn’t, because you’re _not_ dead -”

“I sure as hell ain’t Bucky either!”

It snaps out of him, reflexive, not even fully true, and it’s just mean and sad and ugly but it’s what’s in him and all of that is coming out anyway.

And it lands, too, making Steve straighten up all at once like he’s been smacked. “Yes you _are,”_ he says, low and vicious. “Just because you don’t remember, doesn’t mean it never happened. Nobody _erased_ you, Buck. This stuff is _yours._ All of this _is yours.”_

Then he seems to sink down, the anger dissolving and leaving just his big sad blue eyes behind. “Yours. If you want it.”

His if he wants it. A Brooklyn Heights apartment, a closet full of Dunhill, a fiancé that’s a freak in the sack and looks like a fucking Ken doll. Money, security, status, even a god damned blue-eyed prince. It’s like the _literal definition_ of too good to be true.

“If I want it,” James repeats. “Just like that.”

Steve puts his face in his hands, briefly, like he can’t fucking believe what’s coming out of James’ mouth. “Were you always so - so _distrustful?_ ” he snaps, jerking his hands in a frustrated gesture.

“Well I wouldn’t fucking know, would I,” James snarls back, and it feels good, guiltily good to hurt him, to lash out.

“No. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it,” Steve says. “I know what you’re like. Hell, I know _exactly_ what you’re like,” he says, smiling painfully. “It’s just. You’ve never treated me like a stranger.”

Steve’s not a stranger, is the thing. James feels the scorpion tail of emotions inside of him deflate a little, lacking anything to sting against. “I’m sorry too,” he mutters. “It’s just. It’s not - it’s not that I don’t know you, it’s that I… it’s turned out that I don’t know me.”

He scrubs his face with his hands and then looks up, pinning Steve with a stare because it’s _not_ actually fine to be living in what’s essentially your dead boyfriend’s mausoleum. “But seriously, Steve. What’s up with all my stuff.”

Steve rubs the back of his neck, if not guilty then at least looking like he’s aware he probably should be. “I was kind of… not… great… after you… died. I… worked a lot. And I kept not getting around to it, and things were… busy, so…”

“Jesus Christ. I’m beating up all of your friends. Come here, I’m crying again,” James snaps, and Steve looks guiltily delighted as he hustles over to him, arms already opening for the hug.

This time James pointedly doesn’t feel bad about getting snot all over Steve’s shirt, though it’s barely a fraction of the waterworks that came before.

“But it worked out,” Steve says in his ear, rubbing down his spine. “I kept all your stuff. And now you’re back. So.”

James shuts his eyes, trying to think through the headache. He’s - back. Whatever that means.

He needs to go back to his apartment. His own apartment. He has a schedule to stick to. A medical regimen. None of this - conversation - went anything like he expected it to go and now he feels like a cored apple, empty and peeled.

His arm throbs, a pointed reminder that he has a body and he needs to take care of it if he wants to keep up this walking and talking and breathing shit. “I need to eat,” he says, drawing back from Steve.

“I can make something,” Steve says. “Or - get something. Order in.”

James shakes his head, actually feeling regret about it even though it’s the only goddamn sane option. “I have to take my meds,” he says quietly. “And I have work tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Steve says, just as quietly. “Let me give you my number?”

“I have your number,” James points out. “You gave me your card.”

“Oh. Right. I did.”

Steve looks so deflated that James gives in, a little. “You can have mine,” he says, and it’s kind of pathetically hilarious, how fast Steve whips his phone out.

He walks home. Steve makes noises about taxis or ubers or whatever but James waves him off, heading down the stairs to the ground floor. Steve seems to realize James has hit a wall inside his own head because he draws the line at actually trying to escort him home, even though he so obviously wants to.

James walks. He’s more tired than he knows, and he ends up getting on the train halfway through. He leans his forehead against the cool vibrating window and shuts his eyes, the robot voice of the train announcements washing over him in a familiar drone. He’s gonna have to figure out what the fuck to do with all his… stuff. With _Steve._ With - Samuel Thomas Wilson and the others he’s been more than fucking. With the life he does, apparently, have.

When he opens his door, he sees Rumlow sitting on his kitchen counter.


	4. Chapter 4

It’s a little bit like tetris again, or an optical illusion, pieces coming together and fading into view. Rumlow has keys to this place. Rumlow helped him  _ find  _ this place, with its low rent and veteran discount. Rumlow knows the landlord. Rumlow found him the job, and the clinic, and the bank his money goes to, and he’s been a constant background presence in James’ life since the hospital, helping him, steering him along. “Just paying it forward,” Rumlow said once, shrugging. “Somebody did it for me, when I got out, so here I am. Army strong, right?” 

And now here he is. Usually Rumlow texts him once a week or so and James meets him in some bar. He’s never showed up in the apartment before. 

“Hey man,” Rumlow says. He looks concerned. “I was worried about you. You didn’t answer my texts.” 

“I left my phone here,” James says, realizing as he says it that it’s even true. 

“Oh, right. I know how that is,” Rumlow says, nodding. “Where’d you go? Do anything fun?” 

Something about the way he says it makes something cold and slow start to spread down James’ spine. “Not really,” he says. “Couldn’t sleep. Went for a walk.”

“Meet anybody?” 

_ Now that’s just clumsy,  _ the patient cold thing inside James says. And then, right on its heels:  _ who the hell thought  _ Rumlow  _ was the right pick for a honeypot job?  _

The familiarity this time is just a spark, there and gone, but it’s enough. Something is unfolding inside James like it never did with Steve, not even in the deli. Why is Rumlow here, asking these questions. They’re watching him, they - who the hell is  _ they?  _

“Funny you should say that,” James says slowly. 

Rumlow cocks his head. “Oh yeah?” 

“I did meet some guy,” James says. “He said he knew me, but he was acting all crazy and… anyway. Told him to leave me the fuck alone.” 

“Huh,” Rumlow says, watching James. “Good call.” 

He knows James is lying. 

“Hey,” Rumlow says. “You know I’m here for you, right? You need anything, you give me a call.” 

“Yeah,” James says, not trying to put any effort into sounding any particular kind of way. It’d be more of a giveaway if he did. Not, he supposes, all his thoughts still arriving in that flat, remote way, that it matters. “I appreciate it.” 

Rumlow slides off the counter and wanders over, looking concerned. “You sure you’re okay, man? Head not bothering you?” 

“No,” James says. “Just tired.” 

“Arm okay?” 

“As okay as it gets.” James flexes the fingers of his left hand, half reflexive, half demonstrating. He’s watching Rumlow too closely. He is finding he can’t really care. “I should probably get some sleep. Since I got up way too early to be healthy.” 

“For sure,” Rumlow says. He’s got his brows furrowed, still looking him over. Close. “You know I mean it, right? Whatever you need, I’ll give you a hand. Buddies help each other,” he says, putting his hand on James’ hip.

It’s as good excuse as any to grab Rumlow’s hand and twist, and Rumlow’s good, he’s fast, but James is faster. Rumlow hits the floor on his back, the wind knocked out of him, and James is up on his feet and out of reach before he even knows he’s doing it. He’s - angry. That’s what it is. He wants to  _ hurt  _ Rumlow. 

“What the fuck!” Rumlow wheezes, twitching like he’s gonna surge up but then just curling on his side, up on his elbow. “What the fuck, man, I’m just trying to be friendly! You some kinda fuckin’ homophobe?” 

That’s a good one. “Yeah,” James says. “Yeah. That’s exactly right. Now get up, and get out.”

“Dude,” Rumlow says. “This isn’t like you. Just calm down, man -”

_ “Get out.  _ Or I’ll  _ make you. _ ”

“Jesus, man, you don’t gotta be like that,” Rumlow swears, getting up with his arms out. Something about the move is familiar: Rumlow holds his hands out like that, like placation, when he’s about to rush you -

James doesn’t give him the chance. He scoops up his rickety kitchen chair and smashes it against the counter, making Rumlow dodge back from the noise and splinters and leaving James with a long spar of wood in his hand. 

“Come on,” James says. It feels good. “Try me.” 

“I’m going, I’m going!” Rumlow snaps, so James advances to make sure he does it. He’s angry, so fucking angry, and the rage is such a beacon in the dim grey world that it feels like joy. 

Rumlow backs up fast, reaching the door quick and groping behind him for the doorknob. “Look, I’m sorry I touched you,” he says. “I get it, we all have days like that. I’ll be back when you cool off, okay? I’ll text you -”  

“Sure,” James says, his whole body singing with the weight of the wood in his hand. This feels nothing like holding a gun. This feels nothing like taking apart some misguided backalley punk. It feels like this rage will eat through his skin. “Get out before I put this through your eyeball.” 

“I’m  _ going,”  _ Rumlow snaps, and shoves out into the hall. 

James watches the door. His breathing is calm and steady, his pulse elevated but not in a bad way. He’ll have to change the locks, he thinks distantly. Hell, he needs to  _ move.  _ Rumlow’s not the kind of guy to go gracefully, or at all, and if he’s leaving now it’s only to get a run-up on later. And there will  _ definitely  _ be a later.

Who the fuck picked Rumlow, James thinks again. Because somebody did. Rumlow wouldn’t be doing this for himself, or for the hell of it. So who’s giving him his orders. 

Someone is giving him orders.

Who’s watching him?  _ Why?  _ In what  _ possible  _ way could he be valuable, except as leverage for - Steve. 

Why is anyone after  _ Steve?  _

The guy has money, but not enough to justify someone who can hire Rumlow coming after him. Is it something he did? Something he knows? Does he have even  _ more  _ money than it looks? Is he - involved in something.

The mob hypothesis comes back with a vengeance. If Steve is mixed up in something - big money something - then that would justify any amount of armed bullshittery. 

What James knows for sure is there is no fucking way any of this is aboveboard or legal. 

And he broke his only chair. 

He feels like he needs to get out of this apartment, but it also feels like a crazy thought. He paces, staying away from the window, the bright sharp feeling of being on top of it slowly sliding out of his blood. He should be doing something, he thinks, but he doesn’t know what, nothing that’s sane, and there’s nothing to do anyway. Nothing besides cleaning up the chair, and that’s ten minutes of sweep work.

But the burn inside him won’t quit. In the end he settles for wedging his front door shut and dragging his mattress across the room like an actual crazy person. Does he think a SWAT team is going to bust in here. This is  _ Brooklyn.  _ This isn’t some kind of Mission Impossible movie and he’s not Tom fucking Cruise. He’s paranoid and brain damaged and he keeps getting flashbacks of some kind of fairytale life which is freakishly turning out to be real. Half real. Steve’s real. Probably. James is just spiralling down into crazy thoughts again with all this  _ they’re watching me, they’re after me  _ shit. 

Then again, better paranoid than dead. 

He shakes his head hard, regretting it when it gives him a stab to the temples. This thing with Rumlow may have definitely - happened - he has the broken chair to prove it - but he can’t blow it all out of proportion. He doesn’t have  _ room  _ in his life to go crazy. He can’t fucking afford the full slide into tin hat they’re-out-to-get-me-ism. It’s late. He needs to sleep. He has a fucking job that expects him to be on time the next morning. 

He goes to work the next day, a headache blossoming and taking root behind his eyes throughout the day. He skips lunch - no appetite - and holes up in the back records room to file. It’s a fight just to stay awake in the dry, stuffy warmth back there, which leaves him no attention for anything but the files. Between the headache and the monotony he feels well and truly dead inside, even more so given that flash of singing rage he felt yesterday. 

What does he need to do now. What steps to take. It feels like he’s thinking his way through molasses, trying to find the line between reasonable precaution and ass-out duncecap crazy. Should he just tell Steve there’s a guy he knows who’s acting… creepy? Who touched him? Hah, James thinks sourly to himself. As if  _ that’s  _ any kind of big deal, when his entire life has been a parade of humping every man, woman, tree, car and lamppost in a ten mile radius and Steve knowing all about it. 

His jacket vibrates. It takes a second for him to return to planet earth and figure out what the fuck is left, right, up, down and reality, but eventually James fishes out his phone. 

_ I can bring you some of your stuff tonight, if you’re home,  _ it says. He blinks stupidly at it for long seconds before he realizes this is Steve.

He needs to tell Steve about Rumlow. He should have found a way to contact Steve from - a payphone, a public phone, something. Whoever set Rumlow on him will know he has contact with Steve. And whatever’s going on has got to be  _ about  _ Steve, because there’s nothing James has that anybody can’t buy at a goddamn dollar store. 

_ If  _ there’s anything going on. He’ll - mention it.  _ If  _ there’s something going on then it’s not nothing and Steve has a right to know. 

_ Ok,  _ James texts, and sends his address. Maybe having Steve in here for a bit will make it feel less like an unsprung trap. 

Thirty minutes later Steve texts again, and James squints unhappily at the glare of the phone and then pries himself up to stagger to the one street-facing window. There’s a truck puttering outside, and in a vaguely offputting flash James thinks: Sam’s. A residual spark of guilt flares under the surge of - relief? It feels like he’s just spotted reinforcements headed his way on the horizon. 

Right behind it, though, is an unfortunately much more familiar flash. James winces and turns away from the window, not wanting to really dig into the fresh knowledge that he’s been rawed in four different positions in, on and against that truck. Thank god Steve texts to get in - buzzer’s broken - because James has no desire to think about how he has no clear idea  _ who  _ was doing the rawing and how Bucky was probably the kind of guy who gave free handjobs in 7-11 bathrooms. 

Steve is just as big and pink as always, looming in the door in an unintentional counterpoint to Rumlow. “Hi,” James says, when it becomes clear Steve is perfectly happy to just stand there and smile dopily at him. 

“I brought dinner,” Steve says hopefully, holding up a big brown paper bag. “Do you wanna -”

Then he breaks off, his eyebrows caterpillaring together as he looks over James’ shoulder. “Buck, where’s all your furniture?” 

“What?” James turns around, glancing back at his apartment. He cleaned up the broken chair, so it can’t be that, and nothing else looks out of place. “What are you talking about?” 

“Bucky, there’s nothing  _ in _ here,” Steve says, starting to sound worked up. “Is that - you sleep on the  _ floor?”  _

“I’ve got the three M’s,” James says defensively. “Mini fridge, microwave, mattress--”

“And that’s  _ all?” _

‘“Yeah, on account of not having that one other M, which is money,” James snaps. He’s got a headache and it’s making him cranky; fucking sue him. 

“Buck,” Steve says, his face twisting up all concerned. 

“I’m fine,” James says tersely, and then gets betrayed immediately by vertigo sloshing over him the second he tries to turn and go further in his apartment. It sends him staggering against the wall, then staggering against Steve when the guy goddamn leaps for him like a police dog. “I’m  _ fine,”  _ he snaps, a little undermined by how he has to splay an arm against the wall to stop his legs from leaving. 

“You are  _ not  _ fine,” Steve says, hauling him up by the armpits. “What’s wrong? Do you need your meds?” 

“Just a headache,” James says. “I get them all the time, I’m  _ fine.  _ Just dizzy.” 

Steve turns him around, marches them to the kitchen and turns on the light. James hisses and flinches from the sudden glare; at least his back is to the bulb. A second later Steve’s giant fucking hand touches his face - shielding his eyes as he turns them more to the light. He’s holding James up with one arm like it’s nothing: James isn’t  _ trying  _ to slide off his feet but it feels like somebody tied dumbbells to all his joints. 

Steve squints at him under the yellow kitchen lighting, his face scrunched up like a dog that doesn’t know what it just smelled. James tries to glare back. “You look like shit,” Steve says frankly, which is at least an improvement over the doe-eyed salivating. “And this feels like it’s about to turn into a fever.”

“Super,” James says acidly. “If you could just put me down and get me the Tylenol.” 

“There’s Tylenol in this place?” Steve says skeptically. 

James tries not to bare his teeth at him. “Why  _ wouldn’t  _ there be.” 

“Because it looks like you broke in and beat up some homeless guy for his squat. Come stay with me,” Steve bargains. “Just for a few days. You’re sick, you shouldn’t be alone.” 

And doesn’t that rankle. “I don’t need fucking charity,” James snaps. He has an apartment, a job, a life. He  _ has  _ one. He doesn’t  _ need  _ this, whatever the fuck this - this savior complex is. “I don’t need to camp in your living room. I can get by on my own.” 

Steve’s face does something complicated. “Buck. It’s  _ your  _ living room _. _ Your name’s still on the lease.”

James stares as the situation recalibrates. “Oh  _ shit _ . Shit, do I owe you rent?” 

“Wow, it’s like you don’t listen to a word I say,” Steve says. “Good to know that hasn’t changed.”

“Steve. I’m serious.”

“Do I look like I’m kidding? You don’t owe me shit, Buck, and you won’t, ever. And I’ll keep saying it until it gets through, too.” Steve seems to have come to a decision, because he hauls James bodily to the mattress and sits him on it. Steve crouches down in front of him. “Either we go to our place - ours, which we jointly own, and on which you do not owe rent on, to anyone - or I stay with you here.” His face says there is no third option. 

James tries to think with the parts of his brain that contain common sense and not the bits that are full of paranoia and crazy. Steve won’t leave him alone. This apartment is compromised anyway. Better to not be here. Better to be close to Steve. 

“Whoa,” Steve says, grabbing him, which makes James realize he’s listing heavily to the side. “Jesus. Are you coming with me?” 

“Yeah,” James mutters, capitulating. He still has to tell Steve about Rumlow. Remember, he tells his brain fiercely, even as it feels futile and stupid without any external notes or reminders or stimulus to back it up. It’s important to tell Steve.  _ Remember.  _

“Okay. Good, good b- that’s good. Where’s your medication?”

James directs him to the pill case in the bathroom. Steve leaves him lying on the mattress, then spends some time rummaging around the place for god knows what. James tries to care, on principle, but he’s starting to zone out and seriously, if Steve wants to steal his stupid garbage microwave then he can fucking have it. May it bring him much joy. 

He startles and flails when someone tries to pick him up, but it’s only Steve. Only Steve, he thinks, one clearly shaped thought in the sludge as his eyes sink closed and his body folds into place. They’re moving. “Jesus, I’m so glad you’re a hugger,” he thinks Steve mumbles, but he can’t really be sure. 

He blinks awake to Steve’s hand sliding into his hair, cupping the back of his neck. “Mm?”

“We have to walk now,” Steve says apologetically. He skritches a little at James’s scalp. James’ eyes drift shut again. “C’mon, Buck.”

“Mm.” 

“We can’t just sit here forever.”

“Hm.”

“It’s warmer inside. I’ll make you hot chocolate.”

“Don’ touch my kitchen,” James mumbles. Steve can ruin boiling water and he never puts anything back where it’s supposed to go, it’s awful.

“Are you just trying to get me to carry you?” Steve says.

James’ eyes snap open again. “No,” he mutters. He’s - in a car? He’s in the truck. Passenger seat. He starts struggling out of his seatbelt. He’s not trying to make Steve do anything. He’d, he’d never, and that’s apart from the very high probability of him doing something stupid, like getting a boner or trying to lick Steve’s neck. “No, I. Tired.”

“Uh huh,” Steve says, and pulls him out of the car in a way that ends with him bundled firmly under Steve’s arm. James gets walked all the way into the building and up to their floor before he can even figure out how Steve’s towing him like that, and he spends a long moment just blinking stupidly at nothing, his cheek mushed on Steve’s shoulder as Steve unlocks the apartment door. 

“My stuff,” he remembers blearily as Steve sits him neatly onto the couch. He immediately puddles into it and forgets why he ever wanted to be vertical in the first place.

“It’ll keep,” Steve says. “There’s nothing perishable out there. I’ll bring it inside in a minute.” 

Steve goes away; James doesn’t know for how long. The next thing he opens his eyes to is Steve touching his face, his giant hand cool and smelling of night air. 

“Didn’t get a flu shot, did you,” Steve murmurs, tucking a strand of hair behind James’ ear. 

“‘Spensive,” James mutters, then jerks up like ice just got poured down his spine, struggling to get off the couch. “No. No. I gotta - ”

“Whoa, hey.” Steve grabs him, forcing him back down. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“ _ Contagious _ .”

“It’s fine, Buck. Seriously,” he says, when James won’t stop trying to peel his fingers off his arm. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Get you sick. Can’t get you sick.”

“ _ I  _ got  _ my  _ flu shot, honey. You’re staying right here. And even if I do catch something, I’m not ninety pounds of broke foster kid anymore. I’ll be fine.”

James stops and squints at him. “You were. Smaller.”

“Yeah, puberty hit me like the fist of god. C’mon. Lay down.”

James stares, memory blooming in his head again. “A  _ lot _ smaller,” he says faintly. Steve used to be a  _ stick insect.  _ He used to be a  _ Polly Pocket figurine.  _ Admittedly it would have to be a Fight Club Polly that did a fuckton of meth, but - but then he - he’d gotten so  _ big.  _ He can pick Bucky up if he wants to,  _ any time he likes.  _ He’s moving Bucky around  _ right now  _ like it’s  _ nothing.  _

“There,” Steve says, tucking Aunt Sarah’s horrible motheaten afghan around Bucky’s shoulders. “Just close your eyes for a minute, okay? I’m gonna get you some tea.” 

Bucky wants to tell Steve about how he’s a Polly Pocket live action movie star played by Arnold Schwarznegger, but his whole face feels heavy and slow. Sleep gnaws at him from the ankles up, and he’s too tired to kick. He relaxes his grip. 

James wakes to a big, callused palm feeling his forehead. He feels himself jerk in reaction, but since his body is currently a tube sock full of wet sand it doesn’t go exactly anywhere. 

“You’re still hot,” Steve says somewhere above him. “I’m gonna go to the pharmacy. Did you take your own stuff already?”

James manages to unstick his eyes with heroic effort. “Whluh?”

“This says morning and evening - did you take the morning dose?” 

James stares groggily at the pink and blond fresco that unsteadily resolves into Steve’s face. He’s holding something bright orange and full of little rattly things. James recognizes one of his pill bottles just as Steve’s words finally drip through the coffee filter of recognition. “Yur,” James agrees. He never misses a dose.

“Okay. We’re out of Nyquil,” Steve says. “I’m gonna run out and get some, maybe grab some other stuff too. You still like the cherry flavor syrup?”

James blinks up at him. “Dunno?”

Steve’s mouth quirks, a little sadly. “Alright, we’ll try it and see.” He folds James’ good hand around something cool and heavy. A phone. “Call me if anything, okay? Get some rest. I’ll be right back.”

James’ eyes already feel like they’re full of hot glue. He tries to hang on long enough to parse the sounds of Steve leaving, the door clicking shut behind him, then slides back out of consciousness like he’s been flushed down some kind of cosmic toilet. 

At some point he wakes back up, only not really. He’s not asleep, probably. Time only exists because of the ebb and flow of nausea. He doesn’t want to throw up. If he does throw up, it’ll go on the couch. Or the floor. Or him. All of that is extremely undesirable. Ergo, he needs to be in a bathroom. 

Having slowly reached each individual point and through herculean effort compiled them into this painstaking conclusion, James falls off the couch. 

Standing up is a process unavailable to him at this moment in time. James settles for a shuffling crawl that uses the wall as a fifth leg. He doesn’t break any speed records but he gets there. He knows this by the way he suddenly finds himself face to face with a toilet. Success.

He laboriously raises the lid, intending to give a couple of experimental retches just to see if he can get it over with, but then he notices the hinges of the toilet seat have dust all around them. It’s the grimy kind of bathroom dust that sticks and turns into sludge because of regular shower steam. It means this bathroom hasn’t been properly cleaned in  _ god _ knows how long. James drops the lid and switches course to the under-sink cabinets. 

He wakes to gentle pressure turning his head side to side. “Baby,” Steve says fondly. “Come on, you can’t sleep here. I’ll put a trashcan next to the couch.” 

“Wluh?”

“The best thing is this isn’t even the first time,” Steve says, now somewhere above James. There’s the clunk of a cabinet door shutting and a blurry vision of Steve sticking a blue spray bottle back under the sink. 

“What w’s’I tryna do?” James mumbles, completely baffled. 

“Clean the bathroom, I’m pretty sure. That’s what you were trying to do last time.”

“Clean?”

“You clean  _ all the time.  _ Last time you weren’t sick, you were just drunk. Completely hammered, and when you came in here to puke you tried to clean the bathroom instead. I found you passed out just like this.”

“I can’t remember,” James says, bewildered. That’s bad. That’s -  _ bad,  _ he - his brain shouldn’t be doing that. His brain is failing him. “I can’t remember,” he tells Steve, panicky, and tries to sit up. 

“Hey, no, whoa,” Steve says, just barely catching him before he brains himself on the edge of the tub. “Okay, back to bed with  _ you.  _ The Lysol will still be there when you’re better.” 

Bucky has no idea what happens after, but he wakes up again back on the couch, feeling like a vacuum-sealed packet of cat kibble. His skin itself feels thirsty. And, he notices, unsticking his eyelids one at a time, Steve is crouching over him, touching him.

“I’m sorry, honey.”

“Whah?” 

“I have to go to work,” Steve murmurs. It’s dark in the room, but it feels artificial; there’s a crack of bright light bisecting the curtained windows. 

Bucky tries to catch up to current events as best as he’s currently able. “Did you say tha’already?” 

Steve’s eyes crinkle up but the rest of his face stays frowny and upset. “I did.”

Bucky blinks up at him. Details are starting to filter in; Steve’s got his coat folded over his arm and a bag strap over his shoulder. He’s wearing a shirt, buttoned up to the collar. He’s crouched over James to tell him he’s leaving. 

“No,” James says, his whole body startling awake in a snap of cold adrenaline. “No don’t go.”

“I have to,” Steve says, but there’s a look on his face that says he’s a man who has exhausted all alternate possibilities. “It’s a security issue, some of the stuff I work on isn’t allowed out of the building.”

“I’ll go too,” James says, struggling up onto his elbow in his blanket cocoon; unfortunately it’s his left elbow, which means he wobbles hard and faceplants instantly into the pillow. “I’ll go, take me with you -”

“Bucky, you’re sick,” Steve says, looking a little alarmed as he helps James struggle up again. “You shouldn’t be -”

“I’m going,” James says, horrified to hear a wobble in his own voice. He doesn’t know what’s going on but it is mission fucking critical to not let Steve out of his fucking sight.  “I’m  _ going.  _ Don’t leave me.”

Steve visibly breaks. “Alright,” he says. “Alright, honey. Let’s get you ready to go,” and he puts his bag and coat down and starts helping James sit up. 

From there it’s a matter of just letting Steve… do things. Thirty minutes later James is bundled into the front seat of the truck, stuffed into fleece-lined sweatpants, two sweaters, a scarf, a hat, a pair of black Uggs and one of Bucky’s coats - Bucky’s  _ biggest  _ coat, a massive grey leather thing lined in shearling and trimmed in white fur. He also has a huge thermos of hot tea, a folded fleece throw and Bucky’s iPad in his lap. 

Steve’s squinting into the winter morning sun as he takes them onto the Manhattan bridge express lane. James stares hazily at his gold-lit profile and tries to make himself remember to ask Steve for the damn iPad passcode. 

James must have checked out in the car, because when he tunes back in next they’re in a shiny silver elevator, Steve’s arm around his waist, the numbers ticking up on the digital display. They go through door after door, Steve swiping his badge every time, until they end up in an even shinier office with a big window view. They’re downtown; the side of the Freedom Tower gleams just outside. 

James gets installed on a big black couch that dominates fully half the office. Steve puts the thermos and ipad on the low end table, gets the fleece throw over James’ lap, presses an absent kiss to his temple and then goes for his desk, already pulling his laptop out before he’s even sat down. 

James sits on the couch like a dropped sack of potatoes and blinks vaguely at nothing for a while. Steve starts typing and the soft, rapid-fire clicks rapidly take on the somnascent qualities of chloroform. He’s out before he knows it; when he blinks awake again the angle of the light has changed.

He feels better, but he’s had enough practice with evaluating his own bodily bullshit by now that he knows it’s not enough to make it worth getting up. The couch is comfortable. He vaguely remembers the existence of an ipad, but lying here - still in his coat, he realizes - seems fine for the moment. 

He stares at the ceiling for a while, hands absentmindedly worming into his pockets. Steve tic-tacs away in the corner, and it’s actually kind of nice, knowing he’s there but not having to deal with the full blowtorch blast of his attention. He blinks at nothing for a bit before realizing his fingers are touching - well, a lot of stuff, actually. These pockets are  _ not  _ empty. He rummages around, bemusedly pulling out a pair of gloves, some bandaids, a folded paper face mask, a  _ sleep  _ mask, two lighters, some paperclips, a couple of receipts, a mint, a shoelace, a bunch of coins and a sealed packet of cigarettes. He squints at it, scratching with his fingernail; he didn’t  _ think  _ he had a history of smoking, or at least not according to the full writeup he got out of Walter Reed, but then again how would he know. 

The tapping stops, and James looks over to see Steve glancing over at the crinkle of cellophane, then taking another look. “You said you quit,” he says immediately, reflexively, and then snaps his mouth shut. “Sorry. Sorry.”

“I never started,” James murmurs, but that’s not true, is it? He did. It’s his own problem if he doesn’t remember it. “I smoked?”

“Sometimes,” Steve says after a second, sneaking a glance at him. “On deployment, and for about a week after, usually.”

“It’s still sealed,” James says, picking at the cellophane wrapper. “See?”

“If it was in your pocket it was probably there for a reason,” Steve says firmly. “It’s not my business.”

James stares at him, bewildered. “I am your business,” he says. “You keep telling me.” 

“Yeah, but,” Steve says, then seems to stall out. He’s looking a little bit as lost as James feels, now. He sighs and briefly rubs his hands over his face. “I promised I’d leave you alone about it. Me nagging wasn’t helping you quit. And… not like it matters now, I guess.”  

“Right,” James says, not really an agreement so much as a noise made for lack of anything else to say. Steve’s not looking at him; after a second he scrubs his hands down his face again, shakes his head and starts typing again. 

James goes back to staring at the ceiling. So Bucky was a smoker. He hasn’t really felt anything he could name as displacement for any kind of addiction, but then again his body has only recently stopped being a hundred percent inscrutable morass of mysterious and conflicting sensations and gone down to, say, eighty percent of one. Maybe the habit got bounced out of him along with a couple ounces of brain fluid. Who knows. He supposes he should be grateful for it; it’s not like he has the cash or the desire to have any kind of addiction. 

Putting the cigarettes back in the pocket makes him suddenly go cold, memory kicking: his notecards, the ones he keeps in  _ his  _ pockets, are gone. They’re - still in his jacket, in his apartment, they must be. They can’t be anywhere else. His hand immediately goes to his forearm, gripping over the tattoo; that at least isn’t gone, can never be gone.That was the whole point. He can get the cards when he goes home.  

He deepens his breathing, tries to relax. He closes his eyes. 

He wakes up again to a lady in a black dress bending down to put a mug and pink-frosted cupcake on the coffee table in front of him. She’s dark blonde, very coiffed, expensively pretty, and when she sees he’s awake her eyes  _ immediately  _ well up, which is alarming enough to have James shrink back against the couch, trying to push up on his good elbow. Where the fuck is Steve.

“Hey,” she says, wobbly, “hey, it’s okay, go back to sleep. There’s hot tea with some honey, and ibuprofen, and - soup’s coming, should be here in fifteen minutes, but here’s a snack if you’re hungry. It’s,” and her voice catches again here for some reason, “strawberry.” 

“Who’re you?” James asks muzzily, trying to figure out  _ where the hell  _ Steve is; he’s not in the room, he’s not visible anywhere beyond the glass office paneling.

She gives him a big, watery smile. “I’m Angie,” she says, crouching down in her spindly heels to meet his eye level. Between the black dress, stick-thin limbs and red-eyed fragility the overall impression is of a folding funeral chair.

But she’s smiling, and it’s genuine. They aren’t quite happy tears. She doesn’t  _ look  _ dangerous. “I work with Steve,” she says. “I’m an - assistant. It’s,” another hitch, “really, really good to see you.” 

“I keep making people cry,” James says unhappily, which he doesn’t mean to say aloud and, great, brings a fresh wave of tears out of Angie. It also catches him up to how it doesn’t seem like a very proportional reaction to seeing your coworker’s dead boyfriend. 

“Oh fuck,” James says, realizing. “Did I sleep with you too?” 

_ That _ makes her burst out laughing. “Yes,” she says, wiping her eyes, hiccuping, grinning full force. “Oh, yes.” 

“Jesus christ,” James manages, slumping back. This amnesia shit is the  _ worst.  _ “I slept with my fiancé’s goddamn  _ assistants.”  _

That makes her laugh harder, because apparently  _ Bucky  _ didn’t know anyone normal. “It was before I started working with Steve,” Angie says. “Well. Working more closely, anyway.”

“Please don’t tell me that’s a euphemism,” James begs, because he is just not equipped to handle any more facts about his orgy-infested past life and especially not from Steve’s fucking coworker. 

Angie laughs, wiping more at her eyes. “No, it’s not,” she says. “We were contractors first. I’d say it was all totally ethical, but, well,” and then she waves her hand and makes a ha-ha face in a totally incomprehensible way, like oh,  _ ethical, _ who worries about  _ that,  _ or maybe ha ha ha, you think there’s anything that could even remotely be  _ normal _ about our whole ass goddamn situation? 

It’s possible James may be projecting. 

In any case he’s saved from having to come up with a reply, because Steve comes in with what looks like takeout bags in his hands. “Hey,” he says, looking at James, his face all squishy again. “You need anything?” 

“Uh,” James says, really not wanting to delve any deeper into what the hell kind of nepotistic incestuous workplace cross-fucking he had going on with Steve or Angie or anybody. “Bathroom?”

“Right over there,” Angie says immediately, pointing, and Steve thank god hustles over to help him up. 

Steve does a good job of pretending not to hover by using the restroom as well, and doesn’t comment when James drinks directly from the tap. The cold water feels like it thins some of the fog in his brain. “So,” he says after a few moments, bracing his hands on the sink, chin dripping. “Angie’s your… coworker.”

“She works with Peggy, mainly,” Steve says, drying his hands. “But she came in today because I told her you’re - back.” He huffs to himself. “And because I dropped everything and skipped out when we’re in the middle of a time-sensitive project, which is why we’re trapped in here now.” He sighs, tossing the paper towels in the trash. “We’ll go home soon, okay? I can take one of the secured laptops.” 

“She said we slept together,” James says, finally reaching for a paper towel to dry off his face. “Did I seriously just fuck everybody I met.” 

Steve, when James looks at him, is in the middle of rolling his eyes. “I really don’t know where you picked up this new habit of slutshaming yourself,” he says. “It certainly wasn’t from any of us. What do you want me to tell you, Buck? Are you worried you have syphilis or something? Because I can tell you right now it’d take a lot more than brain damage to get you to fuck sans protection.” 

James is startled into a cough of laughter, swaying back against the sink. It makes his throat hurt, but Steve’s grinning; his whole face is sharp and sweet and somehow more familiar than it’s ever been. “You got yourself tested all the time, and you either wrapped it like a Christmas present or made sure your partner was tested, too,” Steve tells him. “You were never reckless about anything you did for fun, even if it looked like it. And honestly, I don’t think you’ve slept with  _ that  _ many people. The average number, probably. You just happen to have been doing it, well, concurrently.”

James’s stupid brain, of course, snags on only one word. “‘Probably’?” 

Steve shrugs. “I don’t know what to tell you, Buck, I’m not your sex accountant.”

_ “Sex accountant?” _

“You sound like you’re looking for a line-item review of everybody who’s ever grabbed your ass. That, or you’re, what, trying to get me to be mad about it?” The sharpness in Steve’s face is a hell of a lot more present, suddenly, without any real visible change. He’s still smiling. “If that’s what you want, we can talk about it later. When you don’t look like you need an IV line for Nyquil.”

He can’t look that bad, given Steve’s still over there and not bodily dragging him back to the couch, and right now he only feels scratchy and achy and vaguely nauseated, though maybe because he’s preoccupied. “Talk about it? Are we scheduling an appointment for you to be mad at me?” James says, failing not to sound condescending about it. 

Here Steve’s eyes narrow, the lines in his face going… tired, even if the smile doesn’t really go away. “A lot of the sex me and you have,” he says, gesturing slightly between them, “involves me being pretty mean to you.” 

“I know,” James says defensively. He’s well fucking aware he’s always the bitch in all his  _ recreational encounters.  _ “We ran into each other at that kink bar.”

Something in Steve’s face goes pained at that, scoring deep, but he smoothes it over. “So if you want to be told you’re a terrible, terrible person for stepping out on me or something, we can arrange that. But I’m not doing it in my office bathroom while you’re fighting off the plague.” 

James can’t even fucking begin to deal with that, which naturally means he has to go and be an  _ ass.  _ “Did you just offer to fuck me?” 

Steve shrugs. “We’re engaged,” he says, finally coming over and holding his arm out like James can’t walk to the door by himself. “Until you tell me you’re breaking it off, we’re done, that still holds true.”

James doesn’t have an answer to that. 

-o-

He falls asleep again on the couch pretty much instantly, tea and cupcake untouched, because standing up for longer than five minutes was beyond him, apparently. At some point Steve takes them home;going outside and making his germ-ridden body ambulate is probably why James feels like laminated shit that evening, getting deposited on the couch only to have a series of start-stop awakenings characterized by bad temper and an annoying restlessness that sends him twisting and turning and sliding onto the floor more than once. 

This gives him an unparalleled view of all the dust bunnies forming entire new habitats under the couch. 

He has a vague awareness of Steve in the kitchen doing… something, but the important thing is he  _ knows  _ there’s a broom and bucket and a mop in that closet right there. Bucky scrapes his way over and immediately discovers that Steve  _ did  _ buy him a Roomba. 

Its lights are off; there’s no charging port in here, and it’s clearly not been used in a while. Bucky props himself up against the wall and pulls it into his lap, feeling his congestion abruptly get worse. Why  _ isn’t  _ Steve using it. Why did he lock it up in here. It could have been  _ clearing the dust bunnies this whole time,  _ Steve, what the fuck. 

It seems he might’ve said that part out loud, because a second later Steve appears in the doorway, blocking out the light. “Buck? What’re you - oh.” 

“Why is this in here,” Bucky demands, gesturing angrily at the Roomba and wishing his eyes weren’t pricking and his nose wasn’t so stuffed up. “There’s dust  _ everywhere.” _

“It’s - the charging port broke again, so I -”

“You didn’t  _ fix it?” _

“I was going to take it to the -”

“It does  _ so much work,”  _ Bucky says wretchedly. “And we stick it in a  _ closet somewhere.  _ It doesn’t get  _ paid,  _ it doesn’t get  _ thanked -”  _

Steve does not sound like he understands the depth of Bucky’s pain here. “Buck - sweetie - it’s, I mean - oh, god.” There’s some muffled noises that sound suspiciously like laughter. Bucky twists around angrily and hugs the Roomba tighter. “Bucky,” Steve tries again, voice closer like he’s crouching down. “It’s okay. It’s a machine. It doesn’t care if you -”

“How would  _ you  _ know!” 

Steve presses his forehead to Bucky’s shoulder. “You’re right. You’re right. It’s - but you know what, I think it’s really happy. You kept it in good repair, and you always change the bag regularly, and you fixed its charging port the first time, and - it does the job it was built to do, right? It’s living its purpose.” 

“Don’t keep it in the closet,”’ Bucky orders, unwilling to uncurl. 

“Okay. Come on, let’s bring it out. We’ll order a new charging port tomorrow. Come on, up we go.” 

Steve takes the Roomba, but then he gives it back, so Bucky doesn’t have to do anything drastic. He gets interred back into the depths of the couch, Steve making him slop some tea into his mouth and then further trespassing on Bucky’s stomach with goldfish crackers. Bucky’s finally allowed to close his eyes again after he finishes half the bag, which would be real fucking annoying if not for the fact that he’s currently on the sleep schedule of a newborn kitten. 

His dreams aren’t great. Not terrible, though, which carries with it a vague sense of surprise. His body feels like week old lasagna and the blankets can’t make up their fucking minds on what temperature to be, but there’s a reassuring plastic roundness under his arm and the voices he’s hearing are friends, even if they don’t sound super happy about it. 

“You didn’t even give him the bed?” someone says disapprovingly. 

“I tried. He kept leaving the bedroom, trying to come out here. He  _ really  _ likes this couch.”

“Is that - is that the Roomba?”

“Don’t ask.”

“I forgot how he turns into a sad cocker spaniel when he’s fucked up. And how you one thousand percent enable it.”

“He’s  _ sick.”  _

“It’s the flu, Rogers. I’m a lot more worried about the…” 

Sleep comes in and out like bad radio, and the voices move around like soap bubbles drifting through the air. He gets touched sometimes, he thinks, but it’s fine, it’s the right kind. They know what they’re doing. 

“Seriously, go to the bedroom. I bet he’d stay put if you’re with him.” 

“Put fresh blankets down if you’re gonna sleep on the couch. Or at least run these through the washer, I think he’s drooled on… wow, all of them.”

“Still Prince fucking Charming. You got him?” 

“Yeah. Food’s in the fridge. You’ll be here tomorrow morning?” 

“You fuckin’ stupid, Rogers? Of course we will.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [procrastinates so hard that another fuckin chapter of this falls out]

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. I am bullshitting so fucking much in this story, holy damn. I did so little research. I wasn’t kidding when I said the overarching goal of this story was to put Bucky in Uggs. 
> 
> 2.Memory dream sequences as plot device = the horse i’m beating to a mother lovin’ pulp
> 
> 3\. I’m bullshitting completely everything about the “kink club”. Well, okay, maybe not everything everything, but there’s no reason for it to be inside another club except for me to have a reason for bucky to end up there on accident.


End file.
